URL Changes Twice in the Same Year

[LindsayDayton]

I've got a new client with a great site, great off-page optimization and some scars and a hangover from a bad developer relationship. I'd be so grateful for your thoughts on this situation:

Some time in the not-too-distant-past, the website is established and new content is posted. We'll call this Alpha.

In April 2015, the client migrates to WordPress, implementing 301 redirects on every content page because of the capitalization issues of the old CMS. That means Alpha URLs are redirecting to Betas.

Problem is, the new Beta WordPress URLs are the the permalink structure: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and update by default when the page content is updated meaning that any updates to existing content cause another 301.

It's my belief that for evergreen content, dates in the URL do nothing to help you and might even hurt from a user-experience standpoint, if not a search engine one. So, naturally, I'd like to move to the simple/%postname%/ structure, which would be Gamma.

So, here's how I think we should fix it.

Step 1: Update the sitemap and navigation and make the desired URL (Gamma) structure the default and the canonical.

Step 2: Change the Alpha -> Beta redirects to Alpha -> Gamma

Step 3: Add Beta -> Gamma redirects

Anyone done this in the past? Anyone have any problems with it?

[DirkC]

Hi,

Did something similar in the past - although the timeframe was a bit different (at least 5 years between the alpha & gamma version) - we also skipped step 2 as at the moment we migrated to the gamma version we didn't know the url's of the alpha version anymore.

Changing url's is always a risky business from a SEO perspective and I hope you're certain that you will stick to the gamma version for the next couple of years.

To reply to your question - the method you propose looks good and is probably the best way to migrate the url's. I would advice to check & double check the 301's. Put the new structure on a test server (mytestdomain.com or on a subdomain like test.mydomain.com - block it for indexing). Activate the redirects on the test server. Use Screaming Frog (in list mode) with both the alpha & beta url's to check that these are properly redirected (you will need to update the url lists and replace the current domain by test.mydomain.com or mytestdomain.com for test purposes).

Also check do a full crawl on the test server (in crawl mode) to see that all the internal links have been updated (there shouldn't be any internal 301).

If this is ok - you can put the redirects & the new url structure on the production server. Doublecheck again with Screaming Frog to make sure that everything is ok (same tests as above put on the production environment. Monitor both Webmastertools and Analytics (make sure you can identify your 404 page in Analytics) to see if the number of 404 increases. If so, check the causes & correct them asap.

If tested like this, normally you shouldn't have a SEO impact.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[LindsayDayton]

That is really helpful! Thank you!

Looks like I'm going to have to get cozy with Screaming Frog, but that's cool.

The good news is that his social signals and inbound links are really strong, so I would expect any damage to be short-lived.