Changing URLs

[TITOJAX]

As of right now we are using yahoo small business, when creating a product you have to declare an id, when we created the site we were not aware that you will not be able to change the id but also the ID is being used as the URL. we have a couple thousand products in which we will need to update the URLs.  What would the best way to be to fix this without losing much juice from our current pages. Also I was thinking that if we did them all in a couple weeks it would hurt us a lot, and the best course of action would be to do a slow roll out of the URL changes. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Thomas

I would try it with a few products to see the effect in analytics and search rankings. Keep track and records (consider version control) of where your backend is right now, so if you have to revert, you can quickly. There are some things you need to consider when changing URLs, especially on a grand scale:

• Make sure you pay attention to eCommerce optimization

• Here is a great resource from KISSmetrics

• Create a strong URL map

• Here is a great URL Mapping resource from Google

• Canonicalize your URLs

• Use a canonical tag on these new and old URLs to reflect the new URL as what you wish to rank

• You can learn more here

• Update your sitemap.xml

• Update your sitemap xml and also submit it to your WMT and Bing WMT

• Correct all of your internal links to reflect the new structure

• Consider using relative URLs

• If you want, find your high quality backlinks using Moz or Majestic

• Reach out and ask them to reflect the new URL structure

• Consider https if you haven't already

• https is now a ranking factor - since you are collecting information from users, this is something you should consider

If you do these redirects correctly, this shouldn't be a huge issues, as Google will pass 90-99% of link equity. Keep track of your rankings and traffic in Google Analytics and Moz. Watch carefully and be in touch with your web development/SEO lead (if you have one) throughout the entire process.

Hope this helps a bit! Good luck!