Value of URL Changes

Threeding.com

Hi Guys,

I have a question. Each product listed on my webstie has product number like /product.php?id=3624. After I spent many hours with MOZ, I figured out that this approach is wrong and I should use the product name as URL to achieve better SEO performance.

Now I am planing to change the URL generating algoritm but should I do it for existing products. Some of them have already been linked to external websites. I am thinking to create mirror URLs but this may cause rather damage on my website. Do you know what is the right answer?

Best,

Tony

BlueprintMarketing

/product.php?id=3624 In in the example you have given it shows a question mark which means you are hopefully not using that URL as your canonical.

/product/shoes/air-jordans/ vs /product.php?id=3624

Would tell a customer

more about what they are actually clicking on.

Remember that you have given an example of “?” “<element id="id”>”

Please use the absolute canonical and do not change-year-old links

Threeding.com

Thanks. In this case I will duplicate the products and use the absolute canonical.

Just want to make sure I understand correctly: All my products URL's are with question marks. I just don't understand, is this wrong?

Regards,

Tony

Alex-Harford

It isn't wrong to use question marks in URLs.

However - as Thomas says, short and descriptive URLs describe what is on the page, whereas the query parameters you use currently don't. "Keyword present in the page's URL" was also believed to be an important ranking factor by the participants in Moz's Ranking Factors survey earlier this year: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey

By mirroring URLs, will each product then exist at 2 URLs? E.g.:

example.com/product.php?id=3624
and
example.com/category/product

If so, you don't want to do that as it creates duplicate content. Using canonical tags to fix the duplication doesn't solve the problem completely.

If you change URLs, you should 301 redirect the old to the new, so

example.com/product.php?id=3624
would 301 redirect to
example.com/category/product

Just in case you aren't aware - a "301" is a permanent redirect, so when using a permanent redirect, even if other websites have linked to example.com/product.php?id=3624 - the browser will automatically redirect to the new URL, passing most of the authority built up from the links you mentioned.

Whether I'd advise you to change the URLs of existing products depends on whether you can implement the redirects. In the short-term you'll lose a slight bit of link authority through the redirect, but in the longer-term, the frendlier URLs should benefit your website.

Also, there's always a risk when making large scale changes to URL structure - you need to make sure customers can still navigate the site without issues, and search engine crawlers understand the changes you've made - 301 redirects are best-practice to ensure this.

Ideally, when URLs are changed, all internal links should be updated.

BlueprintMarketing

Hey Tony and Alex,

Thumbs up Alex did an excellent job of explaining what I was trying to get across. I apologize I did not have much time when I replied.

Tony I agree with everything Alex has said I would award him best answer.

Sincerely,

Tom

BlueprintMarketing

Tony,

Are using magento as a CMS platform if not what CMS?

you do not want to kill your crawl budget by having Google index session ID URLs.

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2064349/crawl-index-rank-repeat-a-tactical-seo-framework

Indicate How to Handle Dynamic Parameters
Tell Google and other search engines when to ignore any parameters added to your URL, such as a session ID or pagination. By doing this you are telling Google that http://yourdomain.com/keyword?sessionid=54 has the same content as http://yourdomain.com/keyword.

Try using the URL Parameters tool in Google Webmaster Tools. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters

Depending on your content management system, the URLs it generates may be “pretty” like this one:

www.example.com/topic-name

or “ugly” like this one:

www.example.com/?p=578544

Large photo

https://moz.com/rand/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elements-optimized-lrg.gif

1zrmCsA.gif

Threeding.com

Hi Alex, Thomas,

Thanks a lot. Much appreciate your responds.

Thomas,

We use proprietary CMS. You can take a look at my website. www.threeding.com. I have noticed there are a lot of things to improve. The platform has plenty of content, much more than the competition but Google ranking is lower than many of the competitors. Now I am reading about SEO and it seems that we are on the right way.

Regards,

Tony

BlueprintMarketing

Hi Tony,

I took a random URL

http://www.threeding.com/product.php?id=567 out of your site and found the structure was identical to what you had shown us.

If you give me some time and happy to give you a lot more information on what can be done to help you.

I see Not found “Rel="canonical"Not found

http://www.threeding.com/product.php?id=567

Meta Robots

Not found

Rel="canonical"

Not found

Page Load Time 2.394 seconds Google Cache URL

http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.threeding.com/product.php?id=567

IP Address 54.72.236.205 Country United States

Private message me or allow me 24 hours and I will have quite a bit more data

Tom

BlueprintMarketing

Tony on the URL I referenced below there is a clear breadcrumb trail to the product. If you created URLs that used a subfolder for the category and then an additional subfolder for the product new for instance / The used a subfolder for the category and then an additional subfolder for the product new for instance

HOME ANTIQUES & HISTORICAL EARLY MIDDLE AGES GRAVESTONE

As Alex said anytime you change your URL structure or your site structure you are going to deal with a lot of complications. Including loss of traction in the search engine's. There are methods of doing it where you go about making small changes as you work.

Let me know if this is something you're considering doing it so I'll give you more information on it and I if you want.

All the best, Tom

www.threeding.com/

Threeding.com

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your reply.

I thought that if I used 301 for redirection would work. What are methods that will not affect my traction?

Best,

Tony

Threeding.com

Salience_Search_Marketing

This post is deleted!

Alex-Harford

There's always a small amount of authority lost through a 301 redirect or canonical, but as long as you set the 301 redirects up correctly I wouldn't worry about it. It should benefit your site in the long-term.

I've overseen a few site migrations where unfriendly URLs (e.g. /product.php?id=1234) were replaced with friendly URLs (e.g. /category/product) and more often than not, immediately after the migration organic traffic and rankings remained consistent or improved. I think there was one where traffic and rankings dropped in the short-term but then recovered to a better level within a month.

If you go ahead with the URL change and 301 redirects, keep a crawl/record of your current website, then when you've completed the redirects, crawl the old URLs to see if they're redirecting as you expect. If they're not, fix them as quickly as you can.

I agree with Tom in terms of the URL structure and breadcrumb trail, though I am a fan of short URLs, so I'd shorten some of the category names when used in your URLs e.g.

/transport/air
instead of
/motors-and-transport/air-transport

Also be aware that
/transport/air
is different to
/transport/air/

so make sure only one version exists - with or without the trailing slash.

BlueprintMarketing

I agree with Alex I was trying to think of a way to make the URLs little bit shorter and would recommend doing so as well.

The chicken is not an insult it is an analogy of somebody making changes to a site without checking the site structure and testing it prior.

When you make the changes use a tool like deep crawl or Screaming Frog SEO Spider

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/test-development-changes/

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/managing-url-redirects-301-302-307-and-meta-refreshes/

Look out for redirect chains shown below and or redirecting which you can check using this handy tool in addition to the other fantastic tools above.

https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/

You need to redirect from https// & http:// to one URL

See the bigger photo here http://i.imgur.com/zQYE65R.png

please keep in mind the chicken is just to be humorous and lighten everyone's day it's not an insult.

Respectfully,

Thomas

https://youtu.be/uJkbhAErRl4

rmuCC5j.png uoNm8WW.gif dDHQHSk.gif uJkbhAErRl4 zQYE65R.png

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