When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?

[Jade]

We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!

[GastonRiera]

Hi Jade.

Best case scenario you should if you can update the URL of the links.

Considering that there will be 301 redirects, the loss will not be that much. There's a blog post of Cyrus Shepard talking about the impact of redirects and states that the PR loss is about 15%.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

Best luck.

GR

[Jade]

Thank you very much!

[BlueprintMarketing]

They are exactly right as long as the page is the same page. You will get a proper 301 without loss of link juice.

However, if you create new URLs that are not relevant to the old URLs and 301 redirects them, they will become a soft 404 error something that is dangerous.

I would index my site using https://deepcrawl.com or https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Take the URLs that I am going to change along with the back links and download them to a CSV file.

After that, I would take the site with the new URL structure And compare it my old URL structure

You can also upload your backlinks and make sure that they are going to the same  URL ID you can compare the two using deep crawl or upload using screaming frog

This would allow you to synchronize your changes.

See

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/what-you-need-to-prepare-for-a-website-relaunch/

https://www.deepcrawl.com/migrating-a-website-with-deepcrawl/

TEST YOUR NEW XML SITEMAP

Testing a new XML Sitemap before you put it live means you can see whether any important URLs are missing from the new version, and also whether your new version is looking as expected.

(DeepCrawl: Put your legacy URLs in the sitemap and only start highlighting URLs from your new site once they have been indexed. This may take up to three months).

CRAWL THE NEW SITE WITH MODIFIED URLS

You can replace any absolute links to your live site with URLs from your staging site using the URL Rewrite function. This is useful if you are adding a specific section to your site and want to test how it will perform within the wider context of your site architecture.

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/guide-to-url-design/

I hope this helps

Tom

[Jade]

Thank you very much, Tom!

What I also want to know is, the many external links which linking to the site's older URLs, after the URL changes (and 301 direct), is it necessary to change the links built on the other sites to point to the new URLs instead of the old URLs? If not, what's the disadvantages? This is also a problem many experience after switching to https.

[BlueprintMarketing]

In a perfect world if we could control all the links that link to our site we would have them link to the new URLs. However what I was trying to illustrate is that when you change your URL there is a method of making sure that the old directly which are going to be pointing to your older  URL structure  Wilburn point to your new URL  structure  via 301 redirect.

Considering you are changing the URLs with links  e.g  example.com/old must 301 redirect to example.com/new