Need to change 1 million page URLs

[mlqsko]

Hey all,

I have a community site where users are uploading photos and videos. Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that. All my content pages (individual photo/video) are looking like this:

www.domain.com/12345-kw1-kw2-kw3-k4-k5 and so on. Where the 12345 is the unique content ID and the rest are keywords/tags added by the uploader.

I would like to get rid of of the keywords after the ID in the URL. My site is well coded, so this can be easily done by changing a simple function, so my content page URLs become this:

www.domain.com/ID

What is the best course of action? 301 the KW URLs to non-KW version? Canonical?

I really want to do this the proper way. Any advice is highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi there,

You'll want to 301 all of the old URLs to the new ones in order to transfer any authority the pages have built up. Canonicalling will not pass any link juice, so I wouldn't do this.

Cheers,

Lewis

[Keszi]

What I would add to Lewis's answer, just to make it clear, canonicals do pass link juice. If you are interested, you can check this article from Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

But for sure the 301 would be the best practice in your case. Because there would be no good use to have the pictures on 2 urls (the kws and the non kws versions).

I hope this helps.

Keszi

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi Keszi,

Thanks for the clarification on canonicals.

Lewis

[Keszi]

No worries! I have digged into the canonicals questions so many times, thought I will clarify.

Basically in me belief canonical links are a two edged weapon; if miss-used, they can lead to a total disaster.

[Alex-Harford]

" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.

If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.

A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.