Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case
-
Hi Guys,
We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase.
www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/
www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/
We will use 301 redirect for old to new.
Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps.
The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure.
My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change.
We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic.
I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise,
Is it really that lowercase URLs are better than our current url structure?
By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ?
How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year?
Thanking you in advance,
Sohail
-
Just in case later in the future you want to turn all your URLs to lower case you can do something like this
In your .htaccess file insert this
ensure it is not a file on the drive first
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule (.*) rewrite-strtolower.php?rewrite-strtolower-url=$1 [QSA,L]Then in your root directory place a file called rewrite-strtolower.php and insert
if(isset($_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url'])) {
$url = $_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url'];
unset($_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url']);
$params = http_build_query($_GET);
if(strlen($params)) {
$params = '?' . $params;
}
header('Location: http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/' . strtolower($url) . $params, true, 301);
}
exit();
?> -
Hello Guys,
Thank you for your reply and excellent advises. We have made a decision to drop the transformation all together and will continue with our existing URL structure.
Thank you all again.
Cheers !
-
For Google there is no preference for upper or lower case - so the proposed change will bring you no benefit. Even if the migration risk is very small, if you are close to your most important sales period - don't do it.
Dirk
-
By doing the 301 your agency is right you won't lose ranking but whenever you make a change, google needs time to take those changes in. They are right you will go down and back up. I don't see how you will go higher by changing the URL.
If the next few months are big times of the year for you than your better off waiting until after xmas to make the change. You have gone three years like this with no issue so really another few months won't hurt. It's not worth the risk because things can always go wrong and even more so when it comes to 301 URLs if something goes wrong it can really hurt.
Also when doing the change ask your SEO firm how they will be doing it. I find setting a RewriteRule in htaccess to change all uppercase URLs to lowercase URLs make it easier and safer than insure 301 is setup for each URL.
-
Sohail
I am not happy. Good question to ask. If it works - do not touch it. The first principal in SEO is do no harm.
I would consider terminating them... poor advice leading into the most important time for sales for you for the year. They sound like a web developer not an seo consultant.
Sorry I am a bit grumpy... but do not like it. Your intuition is spot on.
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
-
Content change and variations in ranking
Hello, I have create a new webpage and asked google in the webmaster tool to crawl it. Within minutes it is ranked at a certain spot. I did make changes to it to increase the ranking and right away I could see variations in ranking either up or down ? I have done the same same thing for a page that has been existing on my website for many years. I changed the content, asked the webmaster tool to re-crawl it. It got the new content within minutes but the ranking doesn't seem to change. Maybe my content isn't good enough but I doubt. Could it be that on old pages it takes a couple weeks to see ranking changes whereas on new page it is instantaneous. Has anyone experienced something similar ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
SEO within the URL /
If I were optimizing for 'marketing success' and my URL structure was domain.com/marketing/success would that count? I'm not sure if the '/' affects the keyword term. My assumption is that it does, but I wasn't 100% sure. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristinaWitmer0 -
Sudden increase in number of indexed URLs. How ca I know what URLs these are?
We saw a spike in the total number of indexed URLs (17,000 to 165,000)--what would be the most efficient way to find out what the newly indexed URLs are?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Should I Use City Name in URL?
Having a website designed for a car dealership and deciding what attributes to use in the URL. Should I include the city name in the URL? Or does that help for SEO purposes? Other ideas of what to research or try are appreciated too. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss0 -
Rewriting dynamic urls to static
We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this: By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html filtered by the brand Mammut becomes: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48 This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page. For example http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html shows the same content as: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue. If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site. I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
How does changing hosting affect rankings?
I have a hosting account that is ancient. So is it's CPanel, its way of operation (I have to call in to change the zone file), and its hardware and software (It can't even recognize Wordpress as a user so i have to change permissions to change anything.) I plan on moving the site, but I want to prepare for any changes that may happen. Currently the site ranks between #1 or 3 for quite a few very valuable words. It is also in season for this business. I know changing hosting data or servers can cause google to temporarily drop rankings. Does anyone have any experience with this or now how long the faded rankings can last? Or if its even true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0