Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?

[TaraLP]

Hi Moz Community,

We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com

When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it.

Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise.

We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu.

So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced.

My questions are:

• If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page?
• Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way?
• Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow?

Thanks so much for your help!

[kinglouis2005]

@taralp I know this is an old post but I was looking at redoing my site and URL structure myself.

My concern was losing rankings with drastic changes also. But I ran the site through a SEO tool and it looks like since this post that not only did you not HURT your rankings, the rankings skyrocketed since then,

If you are still around, may I ask were there any other changes to the site around that same time? How long did it take to make the change?

For others that may be reading this. Does Google still take URL structure changes so kindly? Will a simple redirect plugin for WordPress do the trick if I make category and url changes myself?

I want to remove "category" from the slug also and I want to merge and delete some categories and add others.

Thanks!

[TaraLP]

Thank you!

[donsilvernail]

Hi Tara,

The best way would be to 301 redirect the old urls to the new urls. So if your url is https://sitename/category/product and you want to change it to https://sitename/product then you must 301 redirect https://sitename/category/product ----> https://sitename/product so you do not loose link juice or receive an enormous amount of 404s.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail