Is it bad to update product titles and URLs if they are only slightly modified
-
I am doing some house cleaning on the site and made some minor updates to product titles and a rule was written in and it auto updated the URL to what the product title was with a redirect put in place from the old URL. If this a bad thing and should i leave the URL alone and just update the product title?
Then for the ones i did change the Product title and the URL was updated is this a bad thing and should i have just left the URL alone? These are all high ranking popular products so dont want to mess with any rankings going into busy season?
-
Hi Marc,
Could you please tell us if Caro of i have answered your question? If so, please mark the answer. It's nice to get some credits for the work we've both put into this
Thanks very much.
Bas -
Hi Marc,
Changing a URL is like moving your house or office: it can definately be done but you need to think it through. If you just move and don't tell anyone it will be a matter of time before some trouble might start.
Do you have anything in place that will tell Google that you have changed the URL/URL's? Otherwise it will consider the new URL as a completely new page, with a lot less trust than the old URL probably had. The value of the old URL will be lost. Essentially, Google will think you now have two URL's: the old and the new. It won't all of a sudden realise those are the same.
If you have anything in place to tell Google that you have changed the name of the page, the process will go smoother and much better. As soon as Google will visit the old URL, it will be informed of two things:
1. The old URL has been replaced, does not exist anymore and needs to be replaced in the index
2. It knows the new URL right away and will start to replace the old with the new URL and transfer the value of the old URL to the new URLEvery time a page is being loaded, the server will send - amongst others - the source code. And a header code: 200 is everything is OK, 404 is the page cannot be found, 500 is something is wrong with the server, 301 is the URL has changed to something new, etc.
If you don't do anything, Google will read a 404-code and thus think there is an error in your site.
It's better to send a 301-code because that will tell Google that nothing is wrong; you've just changed the URL. It will also tell what the new URL is.
Check out this page for more information about 301 and 302 redirects:
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/seo/redirectionDoes this help you?
Yours,
Bas -
Was the original URL still relevant to the product even though you changed the product title?
Assuming it was, it's best to leave the URLs alone. Changing a URL (even with a 301 in place) just for housekeeping purposes is not great for SEO. I don't usually change URLs without a very good reason. If the original URL has attracted inbound links, that link benefit will be slightly compromised. You also run the risk of losing track of your 301s or incurring looping 301s if you're letting them auto-update without a solid plan.
If you decide to go with the redirects, keep a spreadsheet of all redirecting pages for your own tracking purposes.
~Caro
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
-
Updated Title Tag preference
Hi, This was a topic a couple years ago https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/title-tag-use-comma-pipe-or-colon I was wondering if there was any update on this as the consensus on this thread seemed to say using a pipe as a separator is best, but in Moz's title tag recommendations it has hyphen and pipe Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name Does anyone know if using a pipe | between the primary keyword and secondary has adverse effects? Also, does removing the brand name for the sake of length hurt you in any way? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Redirect_to in URLs?
I've never seen this before. I'm assuming that it's not SEO friendly and that these should be 301s or 302s instead? http://ksa-beta.motory.com/ar/login/?redirect_to=http://ksa-beta.motory.com/ar/cars-for-sale-search/results/central/riyadh/ford/explorer/2010/ford-explorer-2010-1038353 http://ksa-beta.motory.com/ar/login/?redirect_to=http://ksa-beta.motory.com/ar/account/my-saved-searches/
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
How to delete specific url?
I just ran drawl diagnostics and trying to delete pages such as "oops that page can't be found" or "404 (not found_ error response pages. Can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | sawedding0 -
Duplicate Title Tags
Hi, Are these 2 title tags different enough? Notice only the 's' on Templates is switched <colgroup><col width="559"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Studio33
| Invoice Templates | Invoice Template | invoicing Software | Invoice Software Invoice Template | Invoice Templates | invoicing Software | Invoice Software | Thanks0 -
My number of duplicate page title and temporary redirect warnings increased after I enabled Canonical urls. Why? Is this normal?
After receiving my first SEO moz report, I had some duplicate page titles and temporary redirects. I was told enabling Canonical urls would take of this. I enabled the Canonical URLs, but the next report showed that both of those problems had increased three fold after enabled the canonical urls! What happened?
Technical SEO | | btsseo780 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Dynamic Parameters in URL
I have received lots of warnings because of long urls. Most of them are because my website has many Attributes to FILTER out products. And each time the user clicks on one, its added to the URL. pls see my site here: www.theprinterdepo.com The warning is here: Although search engines can crawl dynamic URLs, search engine representatives have warned against using over 2 parameters in any given URL. The question to the community is: -What should I do? These attributes really help the user to find easier the products. I could remove some of the attributes, I am not sure if my ecommerce solution (MAGENTO), allows to change the behavior of this so that this does not use querystring parameters.
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
How should I shorten my titles?
I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?
Technical SEO | | dbuckles0