Changing Wordpress Permalinks Bad For SEO?

[SamCUK]

Hi,

I have various pages set up such as http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is there any benefit in SEO terms to changing it to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer? I would presume that a keyword would be better for SEO than 'home' which is irrelevant? Also if I were to change it would all the links external I have on other sites pointing to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer be lost as the url no longer exists?

I suppose I could set up a manual redirect from http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer or would wordpress automatically redirect from the old to new? By redirecting I understand that some 'link juice' is lost along the way so is including the keyword in the url of enough benefit to warrant losing some link juice?

Finally if I do change the url to include the keyword how do I do it in wordpress? I can only see how to change the page title using the 'edit' button when editing a page?

[JordanGodbey]

Hi Samuel,

You're on the right track with this question, but you might want to think about your site architecture some more.

I went to your wedding-singer page then to the homepage and couldn't find any way to actually get back by clicking any links. You should think about reviewing your navigation on page.

You're right that /home/ isn't adding any benefit but you won't receive any huge benefits just by changing the directory to /live-music/ either.. but I do think it's better to have something more relevant than not.

If you do change the URL, you'll need to set up a 301 redirect to point all links to the new page, and thus flow the old link juice to the new page as well. Wordpress has some good plugins that are very easy for that (simple 301 plugin for example).

Be careful about creating too many 301 redirects with the WP plugin as it can cause your site to slowdown as all of those redirects are stored in the database, rather than in the .htaccess file.

The link juice lost isn't that significant in my opinion. Just work on building some nice authority links to the new URL. And remember to be "organic" in your link anchor text not to face the wrath of Penguin

Hope that helps,

Jordan