Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?

[LiseDE]

Hi all,

I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console.

This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO?

Thank you,
Lise

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Lise,

It isn't best to do this because Google won't give you any benefit for doing so (or very minimal at best), but what you need to do is to redirect the old URL to the new one (if you haven't already) as this will show Google that there is a new page in place. Otherwise you are just starting with a new page.

Don't change it back, but don't do this to other pages, unless you are making them friendly URL's.

-Andy

[AL123al]

Hi,

I believe that some CMS will automatically do the 301 redirect for you if you rewrite a URL (you can easily check this using this tool: https://httpstatus.io/ . If it does automatically 301 redirect the old to the new then you should be OK as the majority of your page authority will pass onto the new URL. But without doing redirects, as Andy said, you wil lose the page authority.

[Bigb06]

Hello,

There is no problem to rewrite URLs, but you may have good reason and make sure 301 are ok.

For example on my website about comparative garages, if a garage sells its company to another one, and the name change, we keep the same ID in database but we change the name : from garage-name1-1234.html to garage-name2-1234.html, to keep the history from google because it's the same location, but we change the name to alert Google that there was a big change.

[JaredCarrizales]

Hi Lise,

Generally this isn't something you should do unless you just made the page and you want to change it (as in the case of a misspelling in the URL, for example). Like Andy mentioned, you're essentially just creating another page from scratch.

I'd also suggest creating a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one. This way any link equity remains intact.

Here's a good Moz post on this topic: https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

[LiseDE]

I do work with a CMS that automatically creates a redirect, but maybe something went wrong, since the authority didn't pass.

Thanks for your help!

[anthonydnelson]

Page Authority is just a marketing metric made by Moz and won't update until they re-run their index, which I believe is still on a ~monthly timeline. Just because Moz says a page temporarily has a PA of 1 doesn't mean Google sees it that way.

If you have a good reason to change a URL structure, feel free to do it as long as you have 301s. Do not change your URL structure for small, un-needed reasons, such as cramming a slightly better KW variation in the URL.