Website url structure after redesign and 301 redirect chains - Looking for advice
-
OK, been trying to piece together what is best practice for someone I'm working with, so here goes;
-
Website was redesigned, changed urls from url a to url b. 301's put in place.
-
However, the new url structure is not optimal. It's an e-commerce store, and all products are put in the root folder now: www.website.com/product-name
A better, more organized url structure would be: www.website.com/category/product-name
I think we can all agree on that. However, I'm torn on whether it's worth changing everything again, and how to handle things in terms of redirects. The way I see things, it would result in a redirect chain, which is not great and would reduce link equity. Keeping the products in the root moving forward with a poor structure doesn't feel great either.
What to do? Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated!
-
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Website?
Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site? I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
To 301 or not to 301?
So, to cut a long story short, on our website we have a /product page that is very similar to our homepage and doesn't really serve much of a purpose. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the website and our directors want to get rid of it and focus our efforts on our homepage. Problem is, the /product page has a little bit of PA and links to other important pages on the website. I personally don't want to completely cut this page off. Would a 301 redirect to the homepage be a good option or would I be better off redirecting users to our course library page (Our course pages are what bring in most of our organic traffic)? Any help or other suggestions would be appreciated here! http://www.ihasco.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | iHasco1 -
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
HUGE decrease in links since website redesign
We recently added several new pages pages to our website. These new pages were constructed on a dev site, and then pushed live. Since the new site has gone live I have seen a huge decline in links. My external followed links have dropped from 3000 to 500 and my total website links have fallen from 35,000 to 4,500. I have done some research, and I think there is a server side issue. Where multiple versions of my URL may be running. The majority of the links built were pointing to the homepage. That being said I do not have access to our in-house dev person this week, so I am trying to identify the problem myself. I have used screaming frog to crawl my site and did not see any errors which stand out. I realize I probably need to use 301 redirects to solve this problem, I just need some guidance on how to identify what I need to 301 redirect. Second question. If I move a landing page out of the global navigation but it can still be reached through other pages on the website , will this cause issues?
Technical SEO | | GladdySEO0 -
301 Redirect / cross-domain canonical to a URL w/ Ampersand
I have a question regarding ampersands, we are needing to redirect to a URL w/ an ampersand in the URL: http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-&-Associates-Insurance-Agency Will Google pass page authority/juice despite the fact that there is an ampersand in the URL, if we were to 301 redirect or cross-domain canonical to the url? Should we 301 redirect to http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-%26-Associates-Insurance-Agency instead of http://local.sfgate.com/b18915250/Sam-&-Associates-Insurance-Agency? I don't have the option of removing the ampersand Thank you for your time!
Technical SEO | | Gatelist0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
301 redirects and Dynamic URLs
I just ran my first diagnostic and one of my primary immediate problems are duplicate titles and duplicate content. My guess it that because the root URL http://sitename.com (which has not yet been redirected to www...) has generated an entire tree of content which is identical to the tree rooted at http://www.sitename.com. QUESTION: Do I need to do a redirect simply for the root url (sitename.com -> www.sitename.com) or do I now need to develop specific 301 redirects for each of the sub-nodes/pages? ie sitename.com/?q=about-us -> www.sitename.com/?q=about-us sitename.com/?q=our-team -> www.sitename.com/?q=our-team etc.
Technical SEO | | Barrycliff680