Changing existing URL's to improve SEO
-
Here's a general question: At what PR/page rank (or Moz 'page authority') would you no longer change an existing URL that's cryptic to one that includes the related page keyword or at least relevant terms? Does using a 301 redirect to the new URL preserve the page rank? Thanks!
-
Patrick - Great response, really appreciate the effort you put into that and the solid strategy. I do have a spreadsheet where I've mapped each page and related analytics, i.e. traffic to each page over time, meta tag info, PR, age, url, etc, and very few are driving any significant traffic so those are easy decisons. The few that ARE getting some decent traffic just make me think it's worth any temporary slippage for longer term benefit of being better optimized, presenting a clear theme for each page for both visitors and search engines. Knowing I'll retain 90% of the trust/authority by doing the 301 redirects makes it seem clear that's the right call.
I've added several of the link references you included in your response to my reading list for this week, they look like great resources. Thanks!
-
Thanks Umar. I'd call these 'last benchers' (like that phrase), they are relatively aged but really aren't carrying much weight. They're mainly content pages but are fairly obscure right now, so I'm hoping by putting the 301 redirect in place, and optimizing the new page/url, we'll get a little better visibility then we can work on collecting a few links to each of them.
Thanks for your response!
-
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the response! None of the pages are what I'd consider as critical. They're basically content pages produced by a law firm that speak to various topics their clients may be interested in, but they're essentially un-optimized, i.e. only the firm name in all the title tags, no clear keyword focus, nothing relevant in the URL, poor H1 tags, etc. Most of the pages get little traffic, but there are a few that get 30-40 views/month.
I only want to change those that are relevant to good keywords I want to optimize them for, and retaining 90% of the trust/authority is good enough. I'm thinking the benefit of optimizing will outweigh the 10% detriment from changing the currently indexed url.
Thanks again!
-
Hi there
I agree with what Umar says above. Besides the points he has for reason why you should or would change a URL, it'd be great to have context!
Alot of this is going to require research, conversations, and gut instincts - remember, whatever you plan on doing, you need to have a plan that can be explained clearly and concisely. We always hear from clients that they changed URL structures when in reality they just needed a little TLC.
Check the following:
-
All KPIs that matter most to your visibility / performance
-
Your site's goals over time
-
Google Search Console performance over time (impressions / rankings)
-
Take a look at your competitors
-
Is Google valuing domains that have a different or more categorized URL structure?
-
Not a reason to change yours, but it could help categorize your site a bit more
-
Check your on-site SEO
-
Check your backlinks
-
Check your content
-
Check your information architecture
-
Learn more about your audience
-
Are you capturing your audience at the right points? Do you have content to do so?
-
Are you doing everything you can do develop your brand(s) right now?
The reason you should check all of the above is because sometimes the URL structure is fine, it's a matter of other elements that could be hurting your organic visibility.
If you do your research and find that that a URL structure change would help, I would focus on the following:
URL Structures (Moz)
Information Architecture for SEO (Moz)
Moving Your Site (Google)
Website Migration Guide (Moz)All of these resources above will help you move your site in a SEO friendly way and help you preserve as much ranking equity as you can.
Would love to hear the context though! Hope this helps, good luck!
-
-
Hey Michael,
I would like to know what's the main reason that forcing you to change the existing URL? Is it because of the ranking? If yes, then how old is your current URL's format? And what about the traffic stats of this page, is it among the high ones or a last bencher? If everything is alright then I don't think you need to take a risk of changing/updating your URL.
You can change/update the URL if:
- It's a polluted URL (contains codes, special characters, parameters and other garbage)
- You're no longer offering those services specifically but as the Page Authority is good you don't want to remove that page.
In the above cases, you can consider for changing the URL with a 301 redirect. As the Jason said, 301 does preserve the PR and other metrics.
Remember, you might see a temporary ranking drop after implementing the 301 redirect. So make sure to have a proper action plan before.
Hope this helps!
Umar
-
301'ing the old page to the new page will keep about 90% of the trust and authority as the old page.
Regarding your first question, how critical is this page to the long-term success of you business?
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Number of internal links and passing 'link juice' down to key pages.
Howdy Moz friends. I've just been checking out this post on Moz from 2011 and wanted to know how relevant it is today? I'm particularly interested in a number of links we have on our HP potentially harming important landing page rankings because not enough 'link juice is getting to them i.e) are they are being diluted by all the many other links on the page? (deeper pages, faqs, etc etc) It seems strange to me that as Google as has got more sophisticated this would still be that relevant (thus the reason for posting). Anyway, I thought I was definitely worth asking. If we can leverage more out of our on-page efforts then great 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
How would you improve our URL structure?
Hi Mozzers, I have a question about the URL structure on our website (www.ikwilzitzakken.nl). We now have a main category with "zitzakken" (beanbags). We also have different brands, types and colours. Now we have URL's like this: <a>https://www.ikwilzitzakken.nl/zitzakken/vetsak/vetsak-fs600-flokati-zitzak/_381_w_3544_3862_NL_1</a> which seems long and not clean. Please don't look at the query at the end, we can't do anything about that in our CMS. In english this would be: https://www.iwantbeanbags.nl/beanbags/vetsak/vetsak-fs600-flokati-beanbag/_381_w_3544_3862_NL_1 How would you optimise this? We do have good rankings (this one ranks #1 for example), but I think our overall structure could be way better. Would love your thoughts about this.
On-Page Optimization | | TheOnlineWarp0 -
Toxic URL???
Hi I have a URL that produced page 1, number 1 to 3 for most of our industries top phrases. Then we received a google penalty, (as did several of our competitors on the same day). We were effectively wiped from google. After much disavowing we were allowed back into the search results, this took about 3 months. I have employed the services of a top London SEO company for over a year now and have seen no significant improvement. I believe they are doing there best, however there results are VERY poor. According to the various tools, (searchmetrics, woorank, semrush) to name but a few, our site scores very well, yet we are not getting the results. Page one seems to be full of totally new websites, most of which I have never heard of, and have appeared from nowhere. Should I scrap our URL and put up a completely new one, and put a redirect from the original one? This would be a biggy since our url has been around for 20 years. Thanks for reading. Andy
On-Page Optimization | | First-VehicleLeasing0 -
Using phrases like 'NO 1' or 'Best' int he title tag
Hi All, Quick question - is it illegal, against any rule etc to use phrases such as 'The No 1 rest of the title tag | Brand Name' on a site?
On-Page Optimization | | Webrevolve0 -
I have home tab in 2 menu's which calls the same hompage article. How do I get over this
I am getting duplicate content for this article. I need 'home' tab on two menus.
On-Page Optimization | | rajendraksh0 -
An ecomerce seo question
Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues. Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily) What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price. Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names (H1 will be saved for the category name). We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page. As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts. Many thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0