Will changing a subdirectory name negatively effect local ranking?

[AESEO]

We submitted a group of 50+ franchise stores into UBL to fulfill directory listings back in September. We are now looking at changing the some of the URL structure to include city names.

Example:  website.com/store/store-name(not city)

to                website.com/location/city-store-name

Will changing the subdirectory and resubmitting to the directory aggregators negatively effect their search results?

Thanks,

Jake

[MattAntonino]

This is a pretty common trick among the photographers I've worked with.  I can say from what I've seen, there's no benefit to having a keyword in the link like that, but as far as changing, no, it shouldn't hurt you.  Short term there may be some movement but that could be positive or negative, depending on about a billion other factors (how relevant to the cities are the page, are the other pages on the site, etc.)  Google could love the changes, could hate them.  From our experience, it's usually worth just setting it up how you want and letting Google figure it out from there.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jake, Ideally, if I were building a local business website from scratch, I would set up the page URLs like this: website.com/city-services Your example of what you want to change the names to look fine, too, so long as you are going to 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. If you don't, you will lose any links and citations you may have built or achieved for those pages. Also, if this is going to affect the URLs linked from, say, Google+ Local to pages on the website, you'll to change the URLs in Google+ (or other directories) to the new URLs to avoid confusion. All this said, I'm on the same page with what Matt said about this. It's possible for pages with totally lousy URLs to do just fine, in my experience, but if you have a choice, it's nice to write them nicely.

[AESEO]

Thanks for the feedback Matt. My hunch is that short term there may be a bump, but long term having the city name of the business in the url structure could only help.

With all the flux at Google+ Local/Places and lack of support, it would seem the more obvious you could make your location across the page, the better.

[AESEO]

Good call on the 301s Miriam.

After the url site changes, we WILL be resubmitting to all the directories, G+, etc. Thanks for the additional feedback!

[MiriamEllis]

My pleasure, Jake, and good luck with the changes.