What is the risk of changing underscores to hyphens in URLs that are ranking
-
Client wants to change URL structure from underscores to hyphens - reason for doing this is a cosmetic move. What is the risk of changing underscores to hyphens for URLs that that have been around since 2012 and have a lot of keywords ranking in the top 5 in the SERPS?
When the created the site - they structured the URL using dashes and underscores. Here is an example of what an URL looks like:
/programs-degrees**/clinical-psychology/clinical_phd_kansas****-city****/**
*This page ranks for many high volume keywords in the top 5 of the SERPS.
I have started to compile a list on why the URL should not be changed...
- Building trust and authority from scratch
- 301 redirects do not pass 100% of the link juice
- 301 redirecting from underscored to hyphenated versions of the same content is an unnecessary risk to some of that link equity.
- Good chance rankings/traffic will drop because of the URL change
-
You pretty much nailed it. If the only reason is cosmetic (which I doubt has any influence on anything), there is absolutely no reason to risk losing top 5 rankings. Good luck!
Side note.. Google's official stance is that 301s pass 100% authority but not worth testing. You are guaranteed to see a dip in rankings/organic traffic after you set up the 301s.
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 spamming risk
If some websites, which provide information about apps in a particular niche, are publishing the same content which we have given in our app's description when they refer our app for that particular niche then would it lead to spamming? Our website is getting a backlink from one such website so are we at any sort of risk? What should we do about it without having to lose that backlink?
Technical SEO | | Reema240 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Changing URIs
About 2 months ago, my client changed its domain—using 301 redirect—and took the hit in search results. Here's my question: If I convince the client to revert to their old URI, will that help or hurt their SEO? Follow-up, can it hurt to change interior URIs to something that better reflects the page content? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?
Hi Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Reducing Alexa Ranking
I have a site mexat, it's current Alexa Rank is 4,497. So, I want to reduce alexa for this site upto 1500 in One Month. I have done following activities- Install Alexa toolbar on my computer. 2)Put Alexa Header code in Source code of my site. 3)I have a big traffic on daily basis upto 1500 visitors. 4)I am posting Blogs, Social Bookmarking, web 2.0 Profile Creation on daily basis. But I didn't get good result. So please share me some Useful Strategy for this project.
Technical SEO | | afycon0 -
What has happened to my page rank
hi my page rank for the site www.in2town.co.uk was page rank four and then last week it went down to page rank 2 and now my page rank is 0. i really do not understand what has happened. can anyone please give me advice on what is happening
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is there actual risk to having multiple URLs that frame in main url? Or is it just bad form and waste of money?
Client has many urls that just frame in the main site. It seems like a total waste of money, but if they are frames, is there an actual risk?
Technical SEO | | gravityseo0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10