Changing url (permalink) structure of website??

[Mocomi]

Currently I'm working on SEO of one website www.mocomi.com. I want to change url (permalink) structure of entire website which has more than 5000 pages.

Currently website have structure of http://mocomi.com/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/

Which I want to change it to http://mocomi.com/fun/stories/tenali-raman/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/

Likewise I want to change entire website permalink url structure to make site architecture more SEO friendly.

Which means I'am going to add only categories & subcategories before actual link.

Kindly guide with following questions which I need to move forward with this step.

How much is it worth to change URL structure?

Checklist or factors I need to consider while making this decision?

Is it a good practice to change URL's of entire website at once or Should I change it in Parts?

How much time it takes google to rank those urls again?

Which are the best practices to do so?

[Moreleads]

Hi Jesh Krisna Murthy ,

To answer your questions:

• As your site has lots of content in the different categories it makes a lot of sense to add these to the url structure.  They will help users and crawlers understand how your site is laid out. They will also add relevant keywords to the urls which could benefit your rankings.

• For doing this kind of a change you should analyse the following:

• the work involved in doing this change (how easy is it to change this in your cms? in some cms´s like wordpress this change is pretty easy)

• the work in the additional setup of the 301 redirects you need to send people landing on your old page to the new page and to pass on any link equity of those old pages.

• Work involved in updating your internal links to these pages.

• update and resubmit your sitemaps.

• I would do this change all at once, though it effects many categories,it is only one change. And it could be more of an effort to try and split it up.  If you want to be extra cautious though you could do this by category

• When you have done this change correctly and submitted new sitemap to search engines this shouldn´t take to long for Google to pick up.  I have seen 1-2 weeks and sometimes a bit more. And as you have setup correct 301´s you shouldn´t have to worry about this.

Hope this helps you.

regards

[iugac]

I agree with Ramon in terms of changing the links. However, I'm not sure that the change you want to make will have the best impact. For example, http://mocomi.com/who-invented-zero/. This link is very easy to share, very easy to recognize and it is easy to index for the specific question. Moreover, "math for kids" is included in the title which is good. The place I think you need to work more is the specific category. In this case you have http://mocomi.com/learn/maths/. Why is "kids" not appearing anywhere here? What I want to suggest is that you need to conduct a keyword research first before making your changes. You need to pinpoint exactly WHAT you have to change and you need to know for sure WHY you want to do a specific change. Hope this helps.

[Linda-Vassily]

I recently did this with our site of a similar size. We had some categorized posts and a lot of date-based posts (like /issues/cwa/archives/2016/02/post-title) and we moved everything to new categories. We changed our domain name as well, which was an additional issue.

We did it all at once. The month we made the change we had about a 15% dip in organic traffic, which slowly grew the following month. By the next month (so starting about 60 days after the change) traffic was up 30% over our pre-change levels.

Now, not quite a year later, we are up 65% over our pre-change levels and still growing (even though there is still more work to be done). So for me, it was well worth it.

My biggest challenge was making sure that I had a careful and comprehensive 301 redirect table to share with the developers—it was a lot of content to categorize. I started with the pages that had the most traffic/conversions and went from there. I still had quite a few pages that were just brought along for the ride (they were outdated and had little traffic), which I just redirected into a general category. I am going through those bit by bit, updating, redirecting, removing as appropriate.

It's a big job, but it can be very rewarding!

[LindsayE]

I agree with everyone above. A great tool for this may be SEO Yoast Premium. When you create categories that changes your permalink structure it automatically creates a 301 redirect for each page.