Changing URLs

[kian_moz]

URLs of my web pages are based on the titles of pages. For sampel, if a title page is called "product ABC", then the URL for this page is /product-abc. Google and all other search engines have indexed all pages. Now I want to change the titles of some sites. Should I change the URLs accordingly, or should I rather leave URLs as they are. SEO Best Practice says that keywords must be placed both in the title, and in the URL. I think that Google will think that pages have douplicate content with diffrent titles, and it comes to many 404 error, if I change the URLs. What do you recommend in this case?

[donsilvernail]

If you are changing urls, you need to use a 301 redirect from the old url to the new one. This will keep link juice flowing and prevent 404 errors.

[kian_moz]

Thanks for respond. But 301 redirect is not my concern. I wonder whether changing URLs and using 301 redirect will effect badly on search results. My pages are already indexed, and some of them are listet i TOP 5 by some keywords.

I found this: https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo  They don't recomment changing URLs unless absolutely necessary.

[donsilvernail]

Yes, I don't recommend changing them either unless necessary. If some rank top 5 why would you want to change them? If you do change the urls you have to do 301 to loose the least amount of ranking. You may loose some ranking with the 301 redirect. You will loose much more if you out right change the urls.

[Yuki-hero]

Hi Kian_moz

I feel it depends on how you want to change and how big the impact of changing URL as well as title tag. My situation was quite similar to you and I've changed one of my blog post URL and now the page has got 9th position which is much better than before middle of the 2nd page of SERP. But I lost 36 facebook likes, 2 facebook share.

My blog started few month ago and not popular yet so impact was small and now I'm able to get more clicks so changing URL worked fine for me.