Need to change 1 million page URLs
-
Hey all,
I have a community site where users are uploading photos and videos. Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that. All my content pages (individual photo/video) are looking like this:
www.domain.com/12345-kw1-kw2-kw3-k4-k5 and so on. Where the 12345 is the unique content ID and the rest are keywords/tags added by the uploader.
I would like to get rid of of the keywords after the ID in the URL. My site is well coded, so this can be easily done by changing a simple function, so my content page URLs become this:
What is the best course of action? 301 the KW URLs to non-KW version? Canonical?
I really want to do this the proper way. Any advice is highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.
If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.
A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.
-
No worries! I have digged into the canonicals questions so many times, thought I will clarify.
Basically in me belief canonical links are a two edged weapon; if miss-used, they can lead to a total disaster.
-
Hi Keszi,
Thanks for the clarification on canonicals.
Lewis
-
What I would add to Lewis's answer, just to make it clear, canonicals do pass link juice. If you are interested, you can check this article from Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes
But for sure the 301 would be the best practice in your case. Because there would be no good use to have the pictures on 2 urls (the kws and the non kws versions).
I hope this helps.
Keszi
-
Hi there,
You'll want to 301 all of the old URLs to the new ones in order to transfer any authority the pages have built up. Canonicalling will not pass any link juice, so I wouldn't do this.
Cheers,
Lewis
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
-
Do I need to remove pages that don't get any traffic from the index?
Hi, Do I need to remove pages that don't get any traffic from the index? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
Migrating e-commerce platform (same domain). Do I need to be concerned about these changes?
We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices. I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration? title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different) meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before) h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products) additional table with product features (additional content in product pages) adding additional products to store moving to https instead of http Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same. Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go. Any thoughts?0 -
Same URLS different CMS and server set up. Page Authority now 1
We have moved a clients website over to a new CMS and onto a new server. The Domain and URLs on the main pages of the website are exactly the same so we did not do any 301 re directs. The overall Domain Authority of the site and the Page Authority of the Homepage, while having dropped a bit seem OK. However all the other pages now have a Pagerank of 1 I'm not exactly sure what the IT guys have done but there was some re routing on the server level applied. The move happened around the end of December 2014 And yes traffic has dropped significantly Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daracreative0 -
Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
Hello... We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history. Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure. Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts? Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
To land page or not to land page
Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!0 -
Does a page on a site with high domain authority build page authority easier? i.e. less inbound links?
Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0