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
-
Will URLS With Existing 301 Redirects Be as Powerful As New URLS In Serps?
Most products on our site have redirects to them from years of switching platform and merely trying to get a great and optimised URL for SEO purposes. My question is this: If a product URL has alot of redirects (301's), would it be more beneficial to me to create a duplicated version of the product and start fresh with a new URL? I am not on here trying to gain backlinks but my site is tn nursery dot net (proof:)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tammysons
I need some quality help figuring out what to do.
Tammy0 -
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Any way to force a URL out of Google index?
As far as I know, there is no way to truly FORCE a URL to be removed from Google's index. We have a page that is being stubborn. Even after it was 301 redirected to an internal secure page months ago and a noindex tag was placed on it in the backend, it still remains in the Google index. I also submitted a request through the remove outdated content tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals and it said the content has been removed. My understanding though is that this only updates the cache to be consistent with the current index. So if it's still in the index, this will not remove it. Just asking for confirmation - is there truly any way to force a URL out of the index? Or to even suggest more strongly that it be removed? It's the first listing in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=hcahranswers&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS753US755&oq=hcahr&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60j0l3.1700j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Thoughts on my change of address delima?
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains. internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website) companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website) We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that. My main concerns... From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case? As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we? Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts? This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Is it best to have products and reviews on the same URL?
Hi Moz, Is it better to have products and reviews on the same or different URLs? I suspect that combining these into one page will help with rankings overall even though some ranking for product review terms may suffer. This is for a hair products company with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of reviews. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Doubts with URL's structure
Hi guys i have some doubts with the correct URL structure for a new site. The question is about how show the city, the district and also the filters. I would do that: www.domain.com/category/city/disctict but maybe is better do that: **www.domain.com/category/city-district ** I also have 3 filters that are "individual/colective" "indoor/outdoor" and "young/adult" but that are not really interesting for the querys so where and how i put this filtters? At the end of the url showing these: **www.domain.com/cateogry/city/district#adult#outdoor#colective ** ? Well really i don't know what to do with the filters. Check if you could help me with that please. I also have a lof of interest in knowing if maybe is better use this combination **www.domain.com/category-city or domain.com/category/city **and know about the diference. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omarmoscatt0 -
Changing from Wordpress to html
I am desperately hoping that someone can help with this enquiry. I set up a site www.drug-rehab.ltd.uk about two years ago, on wordpress. I was enjoying top four positions for my local search. Until, in my ignorant stupidity, I changed the site to html as the page load was about 15 seconds a page on wordpress. At the time I didn't redirect the pages - I assumed that they would be deleted and Google would update the changes quite quickly. I then employed an seo agency to try and fix the problem, and have been using these guys for about 6 months and there isn't any change in the seo, despite them creating the re-directs from the orphaned pages 6 months ago. This are low competitive keywords. I can find the indexed pages by URL on Google. i.e. http://www.drug-rehab.ltd.uk/drug-rehab-buckinghamshire.html But I can't find the keyword phrase 'Drug Rehab Bedfordshire' etc anywhere. I wrote to Google for page reconsideration and they told me that it doesn't have any spam penalties against it, and there is nothing to consider. Does anyone please have any ideas how I might be able to revive this site? Many thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedoctor0 -
New AddThis URL Sharing
So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser. It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment. But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link. What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BedeFahey0