Changing all urls
-
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site".
So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site.
We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority.
The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls?
- Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up.
- Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months.
Any suggestions or tips welcome!
Thanks DoMiSol
-
A pleasure! In answer to your questions:
- there is a slight risk of a temporary blip, but assuming you do everything correctly at the same time, the transfer should be seamless and any ranking changes minimal and very temporary.
- Not as far as I know. Changing the permalink structure doesn't cause 301-redirects to be put in place so you will need to do that separately. You could do that in the htaccess file or you could use a plug-in. We like to use John Godley's Redirection Plug-In or there is another here.
Best of luck.
-
Thank you Nick.
I have 2 more questions:
-
Do you think that doing this I risk any ranking drop? If so, how big and for how long?
-
Will Wordpress internal links work just the same? I mean should I only strip the "site" from the Wordpress URL in the General Settings of Wordpress?
Thank you again,
DoMiSol
-
-
I believe you will be best to do two things:
- put in place a global 301 rule to redirect any URL with /site/ in it to the same without /site/. If the site is hosted on Apache this is relatively easy to do in htaccess if you get your commands right. You can destroy a site if you're not careful though...so take care. If you don't know htaccess find someone close by who does!
- re-configure the root directory of the domain on the server to point at the sub-directory directly. Using e.g. Plesk and command line this is pretty trivial to do. This will have the effect of the server retrieving content directly from the sub-directory...if you set it up correctly it will be as if /site/ doesn't exist.
You will need to do these both at the same time, and assuming you get it all right there shouldn't be any interruption in service, although there will be a period when a mixture of /site/ and non-/site/ URLs are indexed.
Installing another copy of the site is fraught with risk as you could end up with a serious duplicate content problem, ranking drops etc....far simpler to reconfigure the server and domain.
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
-
Dynamic vs. static URLs
Hello Everyone, I'm new here on MOZ and just getting back into SEO (a little bit) after not doing anything 'myself' for a couple of years. Currently my individual URLs show as: https://www.example.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=107 (dynamic responsive site). I can switch it to a static site, so the individual product pages read as:https://www.example.com/catalog/category name/product name-107.html It's still a long URL, but it would be keyword rich. Some of my current dynamic pages are indexed,and due to an upgrade I had to do several months back, I already have some redirects (301) from my php extensions to the one listed above. This is my long explanation to my following questions: Does having a dynamic or static site matter when ranking in search engines I already have some redirects coming my older site to this dynamic site, so I would have to make more directs from the dynamic site to my static site - is this okay to do? I'm really at a loss, a couple of years ago, I ranked 1-3 (on Page 1) on Google for all my keywords, (all White Hat work), and now I'm into great abyss of no mans land of the internet (ranked on Page 3+) Thank you for any and all help from everyone! ~Sandra
Technical SEO | | rankmenow0 -
Canonical URLs on location based offers
hello world. i offer first aid courses in different locations in switzerland. now i'm not sure if i have to make the single registration pages rel="canonical" or not. example:
Technical SEO | | alekaj
location 1 -> course list @ Nothelferkurse Thun
location 2 -> course list @ Nothelferkurse Bern the content is almost the same. how do i have to handle with it? thanks for your help!2 -
Canonical URL
Hi there Our website www.snowbusiness.com has a non www version and this one has 398 backlinks. What is the best way of transfering this link value if i establish the www. address as the canonical URL? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SnowFX0 -
Changed URLs from Upper to Lower Case, and lost page authority should we switch back?
During an overhaul of our site architecture we switched from having capitals in our urls to all lower case, we did the 301's but the page authority is not nearly what it was should we switch back? (new) http://www.usleaseoption.com/rent-to-own/florida vs (old) http://www.usleaseoption.com/rent-to-own/Florida/
Technical SEO | | mjo1360 -
Should I change my host
Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good... I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world. I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location. Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
Technical SEO | | jkundrotas0 -
Compare URLs with 302 redirects
Hello I have a store which was developed in Magento. I have about 8300 errors like this: URL: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/100/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGVwcmludGVyZGVwby5jb20vcHJpbnRlci1wYXJ0cy5odG1sP3A9NA,,/ 1 Warning 302 (Temporary Redirect) Found 3 days ago <dl> <dt>Redirects to</dt> <dt>http://goo.gl/XMaZg</dt> <dd>Description</dd> <dd>Using a 302 redirect will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any link juice (ranking power). We highly recommend that you replace 302 redirects with 301 redirects.</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a> These URLs, are generated by magento by the COMPARE feature. In my store we bought an extension called SEO Enterprise Suite and I asked the developers(www.mageworx) about this error. Their answer is: Sorry for the late reply. Our extension adds NOINDEX,FOLLOW tag to compare and cookies pages so that they won't be indexed. I do not think that these redirects can hurt your SEO because these pages won't be indexed at all. The question is: What should I do? Is there anyway that SEOMOZ ignores these URLs? What should I do next, I just dont like to have that HIGH number of errors and warnings. Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
/$1 URL Showing Up
Whenever I crawl my site with any kind of bot or a sitemap generator over my site. it comes up with /$1 version of my URLs. For example: It gives me hdiconference.com & hdiconference.com/$1 and hdiconference.com/purchases & hdiconference.com/purchases/$1 Then I get warnings saying that it's duplicate content. Here's the problem: I can't find these /$1 URLs anywhere. Even when I type them in, I get a 404 error. I don't know what they are, where they came from, and I can't find them when I scour my code. So, I'm trying to figure out where the crawlers are picking this up. Where are these things? If sitemap generators and other site crawlers are seeing them, I have to assume that Googlebot is seeing them as well. Any help? My developers are at a loss as well.
Technical SEO | | HDI0