URLs: To Change or Not to Change

[csmithal]

Hello,

We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this:

/africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania

/central-south-america/galapagos-islands

My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2.

/central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises

My questions are:

1. Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to?

This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem?

Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post.

Any advice appreciated.

[DanDeceuster]

Never do a double 301 redirect. Google hates that. Every redirect should point one URL to it's new location.

Don't make landing pages to target specific phrases if they aren't the page you want to drive the traffic to. Honestly, the keywords in your URL means about as much as a drop of water in the ocean. Just adding keywords to your URL is not going to get you from page 2 or 3 to page 1.

The important thing to do is keep a consistent URL structure throughout the website. As long as you are doing that you're in good shape. Also, I would make sure the directories one level up from your final url's are all pages as well. By that I mean /central-south-america should be a real page of content if it is part of the url for /central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises.

[krissy-cca]

The more times you redirect a URL, in my opinion, the more value you lose. The URLs above look fine. Don't forget your URL isn't the only ranking factor. Are all your on-page elements as good as they can be? Does the content on the page fit with what the URL is telling us?

DD

#edit - Agree with above post - double-posted!

[csmithal]

Dan, Damien:

Thanks for your answers - they were very helpful in being "forced to consider" this issue. I'm basically planning on paying a service to generate 125+ articles for me over 4 months, and was trying to decide on the most beneficial way to house them. The service recommended building landing pages aimed at each of those terms, but we don't want content pages outranking commerce pages - sales are what it's all about, at the end of the day!! That said, what would be your recommendation?

My thinking was to publish them under the blog under the most relevant categories, then push to the authority pages via anchor-text links.

[krissy-cca]

Commerce pages must still rank and therefore will still need to be optimised whichn will include unique content. Pointing from the blog content to the e-com page is good but don't use the same anchor text and URL throughout the site. Spice it up a bit

[csmithal]

Damien,

Thanks very much for your input. I have been doing a lot of reading on content siloing, and my question (FINAL   is, how similar or dissimilar should the URLs and on-page SEO on the landing pages be from the product pages? For instance, if I'm targeting "amazon river cruises" and "galapagos islands cruises" on the product pages, should I consciously seek to use variations for the landing pages, such as "amazon river tours" and "galapagos islands tours"?

Best,

Carlton

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Are you still looking for an answer, or have you gone ahead and implemented (or deciding against implementing) the url changes? Do you have any lessons learned you can share?

Thanks!

[94501]

Have you looked at how the pages are externally linked to by other sites? Compare that to who does rank on page one and you might find some opportunities. IMHO, 301ing a url is really throwing in the towel.