Would changing permalink structure of 7,500 articles be good or bad?

[lucwiesman]

Morning everyone,

I'm the tech at a large men's lifestyle publisher and we're currently running the old /year/month/ URL structure in Wordpress.

Now I've read countless articles about pro's and con's of month date vs post type formats (/2016/06/sample-post/ vs /sample-post/) and considering we produce both evergreen and daily news content we're stuck with making a decision.

Currently we receive about 10,000 organic referrals per day (has been stuck at this for 12 months) but considering we have 7,500 articles, have 10 full-time staff and have been around for close to 7 years we think we're underperforming.

Now providing we 301 redirect every old article to the new structure is there any other reason not to do this change?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Axps36D

[mediawyse]

Good question, and you should be aware that recent large scale 301 redirect campaigns have shown a small loss (around 15%) of total link authority.

However, Google has said repeatedly that 301 redirects dilute the same amount of PageRank as it would through a regular link. Matt Cutts said this most recently in a 2013 YouTube video that has a clear discussion on the matter. Basically, what this means is that to Google the "loss in PageRank from 301 redirects is so minimal it's not an issue webmasters should even worry about."

Based on that statement, your next question on a large-scale URL change needs to be NOT SEO-focused, but UX-focused:

1. Will the URL change impact your users?
2. Will that URL change be a POSITIVE impact for users?

Personally, I think  the most important question you need to ask yourself though isn't making the change. But AFTER you make the change can you really justify keeping 7500+ articles?

Let's be honest, are you REALLY sure all 7500 articles are high-quality? We know that even a small amount of thin or low-quality content on a domain can effect the performance of all the content, so maybe a focused content audit needs to be a priority?

Have you reviewed closely the Google Search Console Search Queries information for your articles? Any article on your site that hasn't generate traffic in 28 days is not a "high-quality article." That's the content you'd want to focus on specifically. Can that content be updated, improved and republished? Or is that content better CUT AWAY COMPLETELY from the domain so that other content has a better chance of improvement?

Just something to think about. Hope this was useful. Good luck!

[lucwiesman]

Great feedback, guys. Thank you.

The articles are mostly news related so there's not a whole lot of reason to keep them, however we tend to have people dig fairly deep into topics such as cars or watches. This content tends to be timeless.

REASON FOR THE INITIAL QUESTION

We have however also seemed to hit a wall with organic traffic. We did think this was perhaps because of having too many articles on the site but we're not too sure.

We get 10k organic referrals per day, everyday. It fluctuates maybe +-100 but it's like it's we're stuck at a ceiling.... hence the reason we're looking at changing link structure to maybe help move this imaginary log jam.

Some of our in-house practices
Old evergreen articles are always being update
URLs updated so date stamp is more recent - then 301 redirect put in place 
Major newspapers and high authority websites regularly linking to use for 'expert advice'

We seem to be doing everything by the book but something's stopping our growth.... maybe changing all the URLs and the structure may not help.

[RuthBurrReedy]

If you are changing the URL of your evergreen content each time you update it and then 301 redirecting the old URL to the new, that could definitely be impacting the organic traffic potential of that content. I would recommend keeping pages at the same URL even after updating them - so it may make sense, for your frequently-updated pages, to move them to a page without the date stamp in the URL so that you're not republishing and moving the page.