Good idea? Dynamic to Perkalink URLs for over 10k pages.

[SherisRanch]

Hey guys,

We're looking for someone who has already done this. We know permalinks are SEO best practices but changing site stucture can cause alot of ranking and traffic loss.

• Is it a wise idea to make the transition?

• How long will we see a dip in rankings before bouncing back?

[matbennett]

I presume you mean switching to a friendlier URL structure.  I'd only do it if there is a clear advantage to your site to change, not for the sake of it.

The key question is whether the site is getting properly crawled or indexed. If it isn't then you need to understand whether the URLs are the cause of that and then change if they are. However, if your site is getting crawled and indexed properly then you are doing it just for the possibility of some advantage in ranking for "nice" URLs. That's a riskier move in my eyes.

Depending on the size of the site it can take months for Google to update it's listings and remove all the old URLs.  301ing the pages can be fairly painless if your CMS understands both the old and new URL format, but you still lose a small proportion of value from each link (in practice I wouldn't be concerned about that too much).  However it is still a big job to do if you are not clear about the benefit to be had.