Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm working on a site that has a directory structure with a million or so pages. It's all served via a java application, and it's sitting on a tomcat box. They're currently structured in a series of folders to reflect how users drill down. e.g.
www.example.com/fruit/
www.example.com/fruit/red/
www.example.com/fruit/red/apples/delicious/
www.example.com/fruit/red/apples/delicious/golden-delicious/
We're looking at using tuckey.org's UrlRewriteFilter to make search engine friendly URLs, moving things closer to the root, rewriting the slashes to dashes, and otherwise making things happier. We're aiming for a structure such as:
www.example.com/fruit/
www.example.com/fruit-red/
www.example.com/fruit-red-apples-delicious/
www.example.com/golden-delicious-apples/
This is obviously going to take several steps.
We're concerned that it may create trust issues with the engines when we're re-writing multiple times, and when we're talking about several million URLs.
Opinions? Has anyone tried using UrlRewriteFilter?
[edited by: jdMorgan at 6:07 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2008]
[edit reason] URL clean-up [/edit]
Yes, almost certainly it will. I'd suggest you think about the tiny gains you might get from SEOing your URLs, and balance that against the loss of revenue from 30 days' to nine months' loss of your current pages' rankings. It could go a lot better, but it could also be worse.
Use your new URL format for new pages going forward, and replace only a handful of those old URLs at a time in order to prevent a major trust loss. And be sure to design your new URL format to be manageable, extensible, and permanent [w3.org], so you won't have to face this decision again.
I'd suggest asking for more opinions in the Google forum here, since this is not an SEO-related forum.
Jim
