Forum Moderators: phranque
I am optimizing a website where all the product pages are in a directory named (guess what ...) "products".
I thought about renaming the directory with he product name (the site offers one type of product only).
The number of pages is rather limited, so at first I thought to rename the directoty and 301 redirect each product page. Than I thought too many 310s would cause some problems with the search engines. I think the fewer redirect the better. So I am thinking about rewriting the directory name with a mod rewrite rule.
I am looking for suggestions, and, as usual feel free to address me to other threads if this topic has been already extensively discussed.
Thank you
vatel
So, you could change all the links to the new URL format and then rename the folder.
Finally, you could set up a redirect to make all requests for the old URL redirect to the new URL.
There's plenty of prior examples of how to do that, but be aware there might be a ranking and traffic loss for a few months associated with that change.
That achieves nothing because you still need to change the links on your pages to have the "product name" as a part of the URL.
In that case, you might as well rename the folder too.
You will still need a 301 redirect from "product" URLs to "product name" URLs. That happens whether or not you rename the folder or use an internal rewrite to connect "product name" URL requests to the internal files.
