Friendly URLS (SEO urls)

[matiw]

Hello,

I own a eCommerce site with more than 5k of products, urls of products are :

www.site.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=61_87&product_id=266

Im thinking about make it friend to seo site.com/category/product-brand

Here is my question,will I lost ranks for make that change? Its very important to me know it

Thank you very much!

[mememax]

It's always good to have seo friendly urls, both for the bots and the users so they can easily understand what the page is about even in serps!

So you have to be cautious:

• be sure to implement well your 301s. Don't leave any page out if so you may lose real rankings
• prepare a new sitemap to submit as soon as you'll be swapping urls.

Even with that google will take a little to fully digest your new urls. SO you'll see some lower rankings at the beginning but maybe you'll recover in a couple of weeks.

Why not make a test with a bunch of lower priorities pages? So you'll be sure about the time to recover and maybe the impact will be less since it will be spreaded in a longer period.

[eyepaq]

Hello,

Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS.

I do understand the reason for this change and over medium - long term it might be a very good decision but on a short run you might see some Serps dance.

Now of course you need to 301 redirect each old page to the new page on a 1:1 basis. But even so you will lose some as 301 redirects don't pass all the PR from one page to another.

I had similar cases when some site went from some urls with dot asp to LAMP and they had to change any way .. with 301 redirects and new friendly URLS on short term they lost some rankings but on a long term they gain in rankings. so if you do that fro a client make them cristal clear that they will see some drops in the beginning.

If you can with this change improve other elements that will help blur the drops.

Also a very good idea is to change on stages - base don categories or something - if that is possibile as in this way you can track, monitor and adjust as you move forward and also you won't drop site wide with a full site url change. (but sometimes that's not possibile).

Hope it helps.

Cheers.

[Yow]

My experience is that any drop in rankings are extremely brief, especially if you carefully redirect all pages (as the others recommended). There have been occasions that I've seen quite the opposite happen... within 2 days, rankings shot to the top for the bulk of the phrases I was monitoring. Of course, that can be dependent upon your niche.

I have found that the long-term positive of cleaner URLs far outweighs the short-term negative. If you are careful and thorough with your 301 redirects, there might be no negative, IMHO.

[irvingw]

"Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS."

I respectfully disagree. The golden rule is keep your domain name unless the site is completely nuked. Update URLs to be more SEO friendly, especially if they look like the ones you have.

301 redirect appropriately, and if the new pages have the same content they will simply assume the ranking positions of the old URLs. Test a category first if you're nervous.