Changing URLs
-
URLs of my web pages are based on the titles of pages. For sampel, if a title page is called "product ABC", then the URL for this page is /product-abc. Google and all other search engines have indexed all pages. Now I want to change the titles of some sites. Should I change the URLs accordingly, or should I rather leave URLs as they are. SEO Best Practice says that keywords must be placed both in the title, and in the URL. I think that Google will think that pages have douplicate content with diffrent titles, and it comes to many 404 error, if I change the URLs. What do you recommend in this case?
-
Hi Kian_moz
I feel it depends on how you want to change and how big the impact of changing URL as well as title tag. My situation was quite similar to you and I've changed one of my blog post URL and now the page has got 9th position which is much better than before middle of the 2nd page of SERP. But I lost 36 facebook likes, 2 facebook share.
My blog started few month ago and not popular yet so impact was small and now I'm able to get more clicks so changing URL worked fine for me.
-
Yes, I don't recommend changing them either unless necessary. If some rank top 5 why would you want to change them? If you do change the urls you have to do 301 to loose the least amount of ranking. You may loose some ranking with the 301 redirect. You will loose much more if you out right change the urls.
-
Thanks for respond. But 301 redirect is not my concern. I wonder whether changing URLs and using 301 redirect will effect badly on search results. My pages are already indexed, and some of them are listet i TOP 5 by some keywords.
I found this: https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo They don't recomment changing URLs unless absolutely necessary.
-
If you are changing urls, you need to use a 301 redirect from the old url to the new one. This will keep link juice flowing and prevent 404 errors.
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
-
Trailing Slashes on URLs
Hi we currently have a site on Wordpress which has two version of each URL trailing slash on URLs and one without it. Example: www.domain.com/page (preferred version - based on link data) www.domain.com/page**/** The non-slash version of the URL has most of the external links pointing to them, so we are going to pick that as the preferred version. However, currently, each version of every URL has rel canonical tag pointing to the non-preferred version. E.g. www.domain.com/page the rel canonical tag is: www.domain.com/page/ What would be the best way to clean up this setup? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Redirect to url with parameter
I have a wiki (wiki 1) where many of the pages are well index in google. Because of a product change I had to create a new wiki (wiki 2) for the new version of my product. Now that most of my customers are using the new version of my product I like to redirect the user from wiki 1 to wiki 2. An example of a redirect could be from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen. Because of a technical issue the url I redirect to, needs to have a parameter like "?" so the example will be wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? Will the search engines see it as I have two pages with same content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Debitoor
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen
and
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? And will the SEO juice from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen be transfered to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen?0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Urls in Bilingual websites
1-I have a bilingual website. Suppose that I am targeting a page for keyword "book" and I have included it in that page url for the English version: English version: www.abc.com/book Can I use the translation of "book" in the second language of the website url instead of "book" ? Please let me know which of the following urls are right " French Verison: www.abc.com/fr/book or www.abc.com/fr/livre livre=Book in French 2- Does Google have any tool to check if the second language page of the website has exactly the same content as the English version. What I want to do is for example for a certain page in English version, my targeted keyword is "book" . So my content would be around books. But in the French version of this page, I want to focus on keyword "Pencil" in French instead of "book". Is it wrong or any consequences? That was the main reason for the question number one. Because if it is ok to do what I explained in item 2 then I will set my urls like: In English : www.abc.com/book In French: www.abc.com/fr/crayon crayon=Pencil in French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
New Website. Changing TLD or not?
Hi, At my company we are making a new website because the days of the old one are numbered. We already decided that the folder structure will be changed so we have more "clean" url's. Now we also would like to change from .net/nl to .nl . Since we already are redirecting all url's (>10.000), we think this is the moment to switch the TLD. What do you guys think? Is their anyone who has some kind of experience/tip they would like to share?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Changing the G+ Author
Hello, We have a website we are linking using schema / google places to a G+ profile. however, this is a person in the company and may change in the future. Is there any issue (e.g. TOS issue) with Google to have one author of a website and then change to another (e.g. change from author being one G+ account ot another with a new image/profile/person)? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemktg10 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
New URL : Which is best
Which is best: www.domainname.com/category-subcategory or www.domainname.com/subcategory-category or www.domainname.com/category/subcategory or www.domain.com/subcategory/category I am going to have 12 different subcategories under the category
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0