Change of URLs: "little by little" VS "all at once"

[Kuantokusta]

Hi guys,

We're planning to change our URLs structure for our product pages (to make them more SEO friendly) and it's obviously something very sensitive regarding the 301 redirections that we have to take with...

I'm having a doubt about Mister Google: if we slowly do that modification (area by area, to minimize the risk of problems in case of bad 301 redirection), would  we lose rankings in the search engine? (I'm wondering if they might consider our website is not "coherent" -> not the same product page URLs structure for all the product pages during some time)

Thanks for your kind opinion

[NakulGoyal]

Pedro

How strong is your domain/website ? Can you give examples of what you are doing ? How many product pages are you talking about ?

[Kuantokusta]

Hi Nakul,

Our domain is quite strong, we are talking about more than 450 K product pages.

Here is an example of URL change that we'll do:

domain/[category ID]/[product ID]/[product name]

-> domain/[category name]/[product name]-price-p[product ID]_[category ID]

[KeriMorgret]

Is the second URL your new URL? You're including your price in your URL? What happens if your price changes?

[NakulGoyal]

I agree with Keri.You don't want to do that. Also, what happens if your product is in multiple categories.

Do you have multiple URLs of the same product then ? Would you have a canonical tag ?

[Kuantokusta]

Hi Keri,

Yes the second one will be the new. It's the word price that will be in the URL and not it's value. We are a price comparison website so the keyword price is core for us.

[Kuantokusta]

Hi Nakul,

A product can't be in more than one category on our website so that won't be a problem.

[NakulGoyal]

Will the old URLs continue to work or will they redirect ? If you can share the URL here in public here or via PM, that might help.

[Kuantokusta]

Hi Nakul,

Maybe the initial post was not explicit enough: we will obviously redirect (301) all the old URLs. And to make sure we won't mess it up with the redirections, we want to update the new product URLs littl by little, product area by product area.

Which means that during this "transition" period, some product URLs will have the old structure, some others will have the new URL structure (both are given above) and the question is: does Google matter about the coherence of (product pages) URLs in the same website?