Migrating From Parameter-Driven URL's to 'SEO Friendly URL's (Slugs)

[Brett-S]

Hi all, hope you're all good and having a wonderful Friday morning.

At the moment we have over 20,000+ live products on our ecomms site, however, all of the products are using non-seo friendly URL's (/product?p=1738 etc) and we're looking at deploying SEO friendly url's such as (/product/this-is-product-one) etc. As you could imagine, making such a change on a big ecomms site will be a difficult task and we will have to take on A LOT of content changes, href-lang changes, affiliate link tests and a big 301 task.

I'm trying to get some analysis together to pitch the Tech guys, but it's difficult, I do understand that this change has it's benefits for SEO, usability and CTR - but I need some more info.

Keywords in the slugs - what is it's actual SEO weight? Has anyone here recently converted from using parameter based URL's to keyword-based slugs and seen results? Also, what are the best ways of deploying this? Add a canonical and 301?

All comments greatly appreciated!

Brett

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Google offers great resources for migrating a site with URL changes, I would review that to get a high level idea of what you need to do from a search engine standpoint.

URLs with keywords are usually the way to go, so in this case it would be the product names. Here are two great resources on Moz for URL best practices (1 / 2). I have seen the move from parameter to keyword based URLs work substantially better from a search engine perspective because search engines (and USERS) value the keywords in URLs. They are easier to read, crawl, link to, and so on. You really can't go wrong with it.

I would first categorize the parameters by patterns. This could be anything from a category to a product to a color, etc. That way, when you're setting up redirects, you're not scrambling to figure out what parameters are; you already know that you're focused on categories or products and to go from there. It also helps set up your redirect file in a more organized fashion so should you need to change anything, you can quickly find what you're looking for.

I would review the resources above and discuss with your IT team about your capabilities. From there, get a gameplan of schedules, responsibilities, testing your redirects, and benchmarking traffic / keyword rankings so you can gauge success post migration.

Let me know if this helps or if you have any questions or comments - good luck!
Patrick