Ranking Implications due to Altering Page Names
-
I'm working on a very large (over 2500 pages), very old website (with pages created in the late 90s). The structure of the site is a mess (it still shows subtle sings of Frontpage!). We are trying to move to a more uniform, dynamic solution.
My question is: what sort of implication will there be on search rankings if we implement 301 redirects from the very old pages (that are poorly named) to new pages which follow a uniform pattern.
Some of these pages have external links pointing to them and others (most) just have internal links pointing to them which will be adjusted to the new urls.
Does the age of the page have a significant implication on rankings? Is there a better way to this than 301 redirects?
Thanks for the help
-
Thanks for the post. Good to hear that someone else went through a similar situation!
Did you do anything about any external links that might have been pointing to some of the pages that went away? Is there anything else that you could suggest that I might have not thought of?
Thanks again,
Scott
-
We went through almost exactly the same thing a little over a year ago (although the pages were not created in FrontPage). When we switched to a more dynamic solution, we did not use 301 redirects and we suffered as a result. With a little bit of elbow grease in the form of optimizing page titles, URLS, on page text, etc. we are ranking even better than we ever have in the past. We did notice a huge increase in branded keyword search and a huge drop in direct traffic (I am attributing this to not having done 301's). Do 301's no matter what!
I've heard of the age of a domain being used a signal by Google, but not the age of a page (I don't have information on this if it is true). I can't imagine that Google would reward an old page as opposed to a page that is optimized and current with valuable content.
It is true that the pendulum could swing either way, so make sure you create a baseline of where you are at in terms of SERPS now and be straight-forward with the stake-holders. Don't panic if you drop. Just work your way methodically back to the top using ethical practices. In short, the ramifications could be good or they could be bad. Good luck! That's quite an endeavor!
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
-
What should I do with all these 404 pages?
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
SEO impact of adding a lead gen form to a #1 ranked page
We have a page that ranks really well and gets a lot of traffic. We're wondering what would be the SEO impact of putting a lead gen form before visitors can download what they want. Currently, entrepreneurs can download a free business plan template kit. It's a zip file that include 6 files like a blank template, an blank Excel for the financials, examples files and links to related articles. The page is : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/tools/business_plan/Pages/default.aspx Do you think that adding a form before downloading the zip file would cost us rankings? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Problem with duplicate pages due to mobile site.
Hey everyone, We've got an issue where our current shopping cart provider (Volusion) allows us to use canonical and rel="alternate" links, however the canonical links are forced on our Desktop as well as mobile pages. When they should only be on the mobile pages. You can view what I mean at the below two pages: http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm https://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=FGD400 Does anyone have any ideas in terms of working around this?
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Unstable ranking
Hello, I own a website wich lately (since like few months ago) have a unstable ranking, I mean that one day I get 800 organic visits (good sells) and then a week when organic visits fall to 700,600,500,400.. then up again Why does this happen? I am lossing ranking :S site : todorepuestoselectro(dot)com Thank you very much im learning a lot here!
Technical SEO | | matiw0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
Pages not being found in serp
Hi I'm helping a collegue with his website. For what ever reason the pages in the Solutions Menu are not being found in the search result for keywords related to the pages. (Homepage mainly comes up in the search result). Does anyone have any advise to why this may be happening? *To give you a bit of a background understanding, previously all the menu content was copied (which I made him change), he also had hidden text on some pages (i made him remove, white text on white background) plus the url structure changed as well. Persoanlly I think he is over using , links, internal linking is not great & the general content is not great in the menu. Your Thoughts are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
On-Page Question
Im trying to increase value to specific pages by putting history, and additional images. Will copying snippets from other sites negatively affect me? Should the content be re-written completely?
Technical SEO | | Anest0