Should I change my permalink structure?

[Whittie]

Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice!

What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall.

Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?

[Hutch42]

While you will always loose some ranking with large site wide restructures, you can minimize it by having your redirects in place as soon as you make the shift.  When I do restructures or site re-launches I create a large CSV that has all of my current URLs and the corresponding URL that it will update to.  Double check the list and use it as a checklist to make sure all of your old content properly redirects to the new.  On a side note, when doing something like this it is a good time to update your site to secure as you are already redirecting the majority of your pages, so redirected them to the https: version is not much extra work.

As for if you should do this, that will depend on your site goals and if adding the date in the url would benefit your visitors or corresponds with another digital part of your digital strategy.

[Whittie]

I think you may be right, but the sheer amount of redirects necessary would mean that it could take me months. I have been posting 4 articles a day for the past year without fail - could it be worth just leaving the crawl errors and hoping that they eventually drop off? This is my quandary.

[Hutch42]

You put all the work into those articles, why would you throw away all the search relevance that they have earned? I would never ever move content and not redirect it, no matter how many 301s I would have to add.

[max.favilli]

Yes it's worth it if you don't care about your traffic and you happy to see it disappear.

[DonnaDuncan]

No, I don't think letting nature take its course is the answer, but there might be another approach.

You could, as Hutch42 suggests, inventory existing URLs and then gather some additional information, meaning inbound (landing page) traffic and links.

• If a page has inbound traffic it usually means the page is ranking well, bookmarked, linked to or shared. No inbound traffic means people come to the page after having already landed elsewhere on the site.
• If a page has incoming links, that's helping build your domain authority.

Group pages according to the ones that are getting a significant amount in inbound traffic or have inbound links. Redirect those. Don't bother with the others.

Google analytics will tell you which pages have landing page traffic. Use a couple of different link tools to assess which ones have valuable inbound links including Google Webmaster Tools. (Every tool is going to give you a different answer. You want as good an inventory as you can muster.)

How much is "enough" inbound traffic and/or links? That'll be a judgment call on your part. So really you'll need to weigh the amount of effort to do this analysis versus the amount of effort to build the redirects and go from there.

That's my two cents.

[JohnBolyard]

Hutch42 - I have a new client with a similar problem. They have about 5,000 pages with the default WordPress link structure and they want to improve the SEO rankings

That would mean 5,000 redirects - is there such a thing as too many?

I've done this with site of up to 500 but not in the thousands.

Thoughts?

[JohnBolyard]

Donna - interesting idea.

I'm working with a new client with about 5,000 pages. I don't want to create hundreds of 404's but if I don't have to redirect 5,000 pages that would be good too.

What, in your opinion, would be too many 404's, too many redirects, or a good ratio of redirects to 404's?

Any suggestions would be very appreciated - thanks!

[DonnaDuncan]

John,

there is no right answer to your question, no rule of thumb. As I said earlier, it really depends on your originating pages and how much traffic, bookmarks and inbound links they currently have.

Matt Cutts says "there is no limit to the number of [direct] redirects we'll follow".

If it was me and I was worried about slowing down the site, I'd create all the redirects and watch site speed. If the site slowed down, I'd deal with that then. It's easier to drop redirects than it is to try to recover lost links because the redirects weren't there in the first place.

[JohnBolyard]

Donna - good advice. I think that's the way to go. Thanks very much for the help!