Should I change by URL's
-
I started with a static website and then moved to Wordpress. At the time I had a few hundred pages and wanted to keep the same URL structure so I use a plugin that adds .html to every page.
Should I change the structure to a more common URL structure and do 301 directs from the .html page to the regular page?
-
It would be good to keep the existing url structure if you rank well.
Word of caution while using plugins : If you are using pages on wordpress .html extension at the end should be ok but if you are using the blog element and categorising and tagging content . It would be a good idea to check if the category pages and tag pages look ok. At times they might end in a / ( depending on how its setup ) and if you force to add .html at the end it might look odd
EG :
-
As its still marked unanswered I do hope Jill has resolved her query.
We recently moved a 300+ page static site to Wordpress - not using a plugin to add .html to the end but instead - we created a list of 301 redirects in htaccess to redirect the old links to the new ones - once Google had done its magic and updated after a few weeks we saw no drop in traffic or SERPS.
-
do the pages have any external links pointing to them? if not then you will not lose any link juice if you change. If you 301 you will lose a bit of link juice from any existing links
but IMO I would have stuck with the static site where you have full control over the html
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
What to do with existing URL when replatforming and new URL is the same?
We are changing CMS from WordPress to Uberflip. If there is a URL that remains the same I believe we should not create a redirect. However, what happens to the old page? Should it be deleted?
Technical SEO | | maland0 -
Should 'View All' filters on ecommerce sites be indexable?
Hi, I’m looking at a site at the moment that has a lot of products. For some of their category pages they have a ‘View All’ feature available. The URL uses this structure: domain.com/category/sub-category/product domain.com/category/sub-category/view-all < currently noindex applied Should the view all page be available for indexing? The individual sub-categories and products are indexable My immediate reaction is no, so long as the individual sub-cats are?
Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks0 -
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
Error msg 'Duplicate Page Content', how to fix?
Hey guys, I'm new to SEO and have the following error msg 'Duplicate Page Content'. Of course I know what it means, but my question is how do you delete the old pages that has duplicate content? I use to run my website through Joomla! but have since moved to Shopify. I see that the duplicated site content is still from the old Joomla! site and I would like to learn how to delete this content (or best practice in this situation). Any advice would be very helpful! Cheers, Peter
Technical SEO | | pjuszczynski0 -
What's the max number of links you should ever have on a page?
Our homepage has a few hundred links and our index pages(pages that link to our spintext pages) have about 900 links on them with no content. Our SEO guy said we have to keep the links under 1000 but I wanted to see what you guys think.
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0 -
Handling '?' in URLs.
Adios! (or something), I've noticed in my SEOMoz campaign that I am getting duplicate content warnings for URLs with extensions. For example: /login.php?action=lostpassword /login.php?action=register etc. What is the best way to deal with these type of URLs to avoid duplicate content penelties in search engines? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0 -
Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed? In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered? This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
Technical SEO | | PGRob0