Changing URIs
-
About 2 months ago, my client changed its domain—using 301 redirect—and took the hit in search results. Here's my question: If I convince the client to revert to their old URI, will that help or hurt their SEO?
Follow-up, can it hurt to change interior URIs to something that better reflects the page content?
Thanks.
-
Thanks for your time, Ryan. I appreciate it.
-
Reverting will likely further extend whatever effects they're experiencing in the time delay that goes along with a domain name change... Take a look a this post from a couple of years ago regarding site migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos. From that you can likely find some missing steps or URLs along the way that would benefit from being fixed. Again, reverting is no guarantee at all that rankings will return or that they would return quickly. Best to move forward with the new site and possible fixes that relate to keeping it on it's new domain as aggressively as possible. Good luck!
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
-
blog url structure change affect on pagerank
We are looking to change our blog structure which will help us with the organization of the topics but the url structure will change if we do this. Right now all of the blogs are under a general news blog, which we will be breaking out articles into several blog category topics Current:
Technical SEO | | theblueprints
example of current structure
current site: https://domain/blogs/news/blog article name Proposed Change:
current site: https://domain/blogs/keyword-name-of-blog-category/blog article name We have ranked #1 for several keywords that we would like to preserve the ranking if we make this switch with 301 redirects. Looking for suggestion on the percentage of chance our ranking will be negatively affected and by how much? Also what everyones recommendation is if we should make this switch or not touch the urls. Your help is appreciated, thanks in advance.0 -
Changing Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Change category of a post
Hi, Finally I decide to renovate my site structure, but I have a question, if I have an old post and I change its category there is some SEO problem? The post permalink is "www.sitename.com/namepost". Last question, it's better to have one category for post or more than one category for post? Thank You
Technical SEO | | Marco3961 -
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Changing URLs
As of right now we are using yahoo small business, when creating a product you have to declare an id, when we created the site we were not aware that you will not be able to change the id but also the ID is being used as the URL. we have a couple thousand products in which we will need to update the URLs. What would the best way to be to fix this without losing much juice from our current pages. Also I was thinking that if we did them all in a couple weeks it would hurt us a lot, and the best course of action would be to do a slow roll out of the URL changes. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Domain change recommendations
We recently migrated one of our websites to a new domain. Obviously we were expecting a decrease in traffic initially, but it has actually gone down by 70% week-over-week since we made the switch. We set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, changed all internal links to the new domain and changed all inbound links that we owned to the new domain. Our research suggested the best way to approach a domain change was by keeping it simple and not making too many changes at once. So my questions are: 1. Are these the kinds of results we should expect initially after a domain change? And if not, 2. What are the steps we should take from here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gouldtr0 -
I physically changed my URL and now I have two...How do I get rid of the old one?
Hi, I physically changed my URL as something else and now Google thinks I have two duplicate pages (I know not to do this in the future). e.g. I had www.example.com/i-like-seo.aspx and changed it to: www.example.com/i-love-seo.aspx Google sees this as two pages now and my CMS system is only showing one page (The new page) Also, SEOMOZ is seeing two pages and further more sees them both as having two different amounts of inbound links? When I change content on the new url page, the old url page also updates. I'm really confused as to what has happened here and don't know how to get rid of the old url so that Google doesn't think that I have duplicate content. Any help to what has happened or how to fix it would be so helpful and appreciated. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | CoGri0 -
Updating rss feed times without changing content
my question is like the title reads If I have an rss feed in an xml file and from time to time I update the pubdate and time. Will this have a positive effect on my website in terms of the rss aggregators coming to my site thinking that it was recently updated and creating links to these pages or will they be able to determine that there is nothing new by comparing it to the old page that they may have stored. thus doing nothing or maybe even hurting the website.
Technical SEO | | mickey112