New blog post URLs due to WordPress permalink structure changes. Any SEO repercussions?
-
A client site had the follwing URLs for all blog posts: www.example.com/health-news/sample-post
www.example.com/health-news is the top level page for the blog section. While making some theme changes during Google mobilegeddon, the permalink structure got changed to www.example.com/sample-post ("health-news" got dropped from all blog post URLs).
Google has indexed the updated post structure and older URLs are getting redirected (if entered directly in the browser) to the new ones; it appears that WordPress takes care of that automatically as no 301 redirects were entered manually.
It seems that there hasn't been any loss of rankings (however not 100% sure as the site ranks for well over 100 terms).
Do you suggest changing the structure back to the old one?
Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
-
If you have a very small blog, with a limited number of posts on a narrow topic range, this perhaps doesn't apply.
If you are bigger than that and cover a range of topics, a multilevel structure keeps things organized, for you, your readers, and for search engines.
You can also take advantage of internal linking, organizing sub-topics under topics both so that readers can find related articles that might interest them and so that search engines can see how your posts are related, and what concepts are relevant. [A post titled "Shingles" would mean one thing under health-news, and another under building-materials.]
-
Linda - Thanks for the response!
"If you prefer the two-level structure (which I would, for a couple of reasons)"
Would you elaborate those reasons?
-
If the old URLs are being 301 re-directed to the new URLs, you should not lose much link authority, so that by itself shouldn't be a reason to change back.
If you prefer the two-level structure (which I would, for a couple of reasons) then go ahead and change back, but as Andy says, do it carefully so you are not sending conflicting messages.
-
Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
I can see no reason not to go back, just take care to ensure any old 301's are removed and that you don't fall into any redirect-chains. That could get messy.
-Andy
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
-
SEO issues with masking blog domain?
We have a client who would like to move their Wordpress blog into a different server from their main site's server for security reasons. However, the blog is almost 10 years old with good traffic and rankings and we'd rather not have them change the domain. The developer has come back with a URL "masking" rule in .htaccess that will display the contents of the blog placed in the new server under a subdomain but still show the blog's original URL. If we block the new subdomain from indexing to avoid duplicate content - are there any SEO implications for doing this? Will Google see it as a deceptive practice and tank the blog's rankings? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundabout0 -
SEO impact when micro site are hosted on third party url
Have a look at this url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kjerstibakke
http://www.bekkevold-as.no/.
On the front page they are providing links to a website created by one of their suppliers. (Three cirkle icons in the middle of the page).
The links make the customers leave the site and open on a different domain, even the branding of the page is for Bekkevold Elektro (see log top right)
The question from me: How will this impact the SEO for Bekkevold Elektro. Would it be better to create a subdomain for Bekkevold Elektro and ask the supplier to point to this? Or is it ok to leave it as it is, having links back to the web site for Bekkevold Elektro? Just changing the target of the link to open in a new window.
Thank you very much for your support on this. I would appreciate any suggestion for improvement for my customer, Bekkevold Elektro. Best regards
Kjersti Bakke0 -
Process for moving existing articles to new structure (URLs, titles, etc)
I am in the midst of a major redesign of my site, including revamping existing articles . I have a couple of hundred articles and I am reviewing all aspects of these articles, including titles, URLs, content, etc. I am putting together a process as I move each article across to the new site and have SEO very much in mind. I'd appreciate any feedback on this. First off, let me be clear that I consider the quality of the content paramount. Anything suggested below is considered "supporting" (that content) from an SEO perspective. But, since I am moving this content across, I may as well take the opportunity to clean things up. The existing articles don't have particularly good SEO-related attributes, in terms of their titles, URLs, use of keywords and so on. So, I plan to do the following for each article. For illustrative purposes (our site serves the wedding industry), I will use an article about how to involve children at a wedding. Questionsunder each bullet. Use the "Keyword Difficulty" feature on Moz Pro to research a specific keyword for each article. In the example case I used "involving children in our wedding". Honestly, I am not really sure what to do with this feature 🙂 I've read everything from "focus on the long tail" to "don't fear highly competitive keywords". So, my current thinking is merely to use it as interesting information for they keyword I choose but not actually make any specific decisions from that ie. make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume. Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? I'm assuming the Google information is not available from Google (it would be displayed here otherwise, I'm guessing) Use a title that uses these keywords. In this case, I simply went with "Involving children in our wedding". Same for URL - /wedding-guests/involving-children-in-our-wedding If I have a reasonable, short and human-friendly term like this (I can do this with virtually every article quite easily), is there any reason why the URL and the title should not be the same? In short, the title and URL are both a relatively concise "mini-sentence" Make sure the meta description of the article is easy-to-read (for humans) and uses the keyword (sentence) Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document Implement 301 redirects from the old URL (old site) to the new URL This seems like a pretty obvious approach for articles where the URL has changed (which will be most of them). But what do I do with articles that I am going to remove. Should I redirect (301) to a related article (so at least the visitor ends up on a page that is generally relevant) or just let this "fall through" as a non-existent page (401)? As I say, I have 200+ articles to go through I want to make sure I am taking this advantage to clean things up. Anything leaping out as missing/problematic? Thanks in advance Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
How careful do you need to be about changes to readable URLs?
We are moving to Sitecore where the standard out the box is that if you change page title it amends the URL as well. I am worried that this will lead to SEO issues and am considering whether we need to get it locked down so that if the page title is amended (only in a minor way) it does not also change the URL. I have never worked with readable URLs before - what are the implications of the URL not exactly matching the wording of the page title?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alzheimerssoc0 -
Changing business name from keyword to brand name, what are the effects on SEO?
I think it's best to give you an example to illustrate what I'm asking here. Current Brand Name: Keyword Driven Brand Name (keyworddrivenbrandname.com) New brand Name: KDBN (kdbn.com) What will the effects of this change be. I'm slightly worried that we have lots of links with the anchor text "Keyword Driven Brand Name" and we rank very well for terms like "Keyword Driven" and "Brand Name". I guess what I'm asking is, do we need to go and change all those anchors to KDBN and will this upset our search rankings. Or do we leave the existing anchors? But will Google see this as over-optimised anchor text and penalise our website? Decisions decisions! Also, should we leave the old brand name in our title tags, at least for the transitional period, i.e. KDBN | Targeted Keyword | Keyword Driven Brand Name Any help with this would be really appreciated, Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
Multilingual and Multiregional SEO URL Structure
Hello 2 questions: I have a client that has country specific TLDs and has pages for each city and wants to target languages. What's the best practice? or does the order not matter? www.domain.ca/fr-ca/toronto www.domain.ca/toronto/fr-ca 2. This client currently has the following URL structure, is this not SEO friendly? does it matter to have Canada repeated? www.domain.ca/canada/fr-ca/toronto Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nrv0 -
Should I Host New Blog On Different Server?
I am planning on starting a new blog focused on a very specific subject that is related to my current Lead Generation website. I am doing this because I want to build rankings for this site and have it link back to my Lead Generation website to increase its rankings (this is the main purpose). My question is do I need to host it on another server so Google will not see it as having the same IP or Subnet? Note: I already have one blog linked to my Lead Generation website under the same domain. This new blog would be linked to an entirely different domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
Migrating a site with new URL structure
I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise. The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same. I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that. Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0