Changing Link Structure Hurt Us?

[ecommerceprofit]

Right now our link structure is:

http://www.example.com/categoryname/productname.html

our competitors who are beating us in Google are:

http://www.example.com/productname.html

I want to scrap the old directory structure and create a whole new structure just like my competitors...

My question is this...if I scrap the directory structure there will be a ton of 404 pages which will automatically default to my home page - will Google find my new directory structure eventually? OR perhaps I should put a link on my old pages leading customers to our new link that replaced the old one? We have pretty good positioning and I do not want to get the Google God angry with our site. Of course, I could leave both directory structures up but that would be duplicate content...

[edited by: encyclo at 4:44 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2007]
[edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit]

[paladin]

if I scrap the directory structure there will be a ton of 404 pages which will automatically default to my home page

How about putting a 301 Permenant Redirect from domain.com/category/productName.html to domain.com/productName.html

[buckworks]

scrap the old directory structure and create a whole new structure just like my competitors...

File names are only one tiny piece of the SEO puzzle. Before you put yourself through all that work, search carefully for other reasons why they might be ahead of you.

It's very likely you could find other ways to improve your rankings that would be a lot easier to achieve and wouldn't risk disrupting your existing web presence so much.

[Philosopher]

I would NOT recommend this unless there was something VERY wrong.

In doing this, your site will basically look completely new in the eyes of the engine. While the content may be the same, every page will be new.

You can go back through the archives of the Google news section and read many horror stories of people doing similar things and having their site disappear for months.

Doing an entire URL restructuring is a last result after you have made sure something else isn't the cause of your ranking problems. Not only is it usually not necessary, if done, your site will most likely take 6-12 (or longer) months to regain any rankings at all.

There are generally many other things you can do that will often have a much more immediate and positive impact on your rankings.

[edited by: Philosopher at 5:32 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2007]

[ecommerceprofit]

Excellent! Thank you so much everyone...301 perm redirect sounds good but I will take no chances as the others point out - thank you - I will just add more content - this will be a safe bet...good advice.

[arieng]

I am working with a site that has serious URL issues. It is a dynamically-created site written in VBA, and some of the main URLs look like http://example.com/cgi-bin/function.exe?identifier=010.142.

The site gets decent Google rankings for some competitive keywords, but there is a definite downward trend to organic traffic. I've been recommending that we recreate the primary linking structure (pages within the main navigation scheme, about 200 pages that don't rank well now) with static pages and clean URLs.

At what point is it worth renaming your pages, and what pitfalls do I have to watch out for?

[rocknbil]

Have you considered using mod_rewrite instead?

[arieng]

Wish we could, but they're on a Windows server. Is there a comparable alternative?

[arieng]

Never mind, I found it. Hmmm, by jove I think this will work.

[Ledfish]

For those curious but who did not find it, search isapi rewrite

[sun818]

The 301 Redirect is ideal if you are changing structure as you also have referral traffic from non-search engines that you want sent to the correct page. I still have referrals on web pages from five years ago that I still redirect. There's another ASP script called Smart404 (free) that can also handle the 301 Redirects.

I like the shorter URL idea since the link remains intact in e-mail. I think keeping URLs 70 characters or less (including the "http://") will keep the URL intact even with e-mails that are forwarded "> ".

[julesn]

Having /category/ before product in the path causes problems if you want to change your categorisation, and if products are in more than one category they can cause duplicate content if you have /categoryA/productA and /categoryB/productA then you have duplicate productA pages (although see my comments below)

Another option is as follows.

Rather than setting up 301s immediately from /category/product to /product, you can can rewite so that the old /category/productname urls land on the same page as /product. This ensures external links and existing search engine listings still arrive on a valid page.

But make sure you ensure that all your site moves to using /product and none of the old /category/product links are left linked on your site. Then later, to tidy up, set 301s on the old /category/product urls.

Over a short time the old urls will be replaced in the search engines by the new shorter version without the /category/

Of course, this would still leave duplicate urls for the same content for the transition period of a few months, but IMHO (and from experience) this doesn't generally cause too much of a problem, search engines are very aware a lot of sites have different urls for addressing the same content, and as long as you don't link to both url formats on your site at the same time you'll probably be ok.

Of course any changes have a risk, and its only you that can measure this risk. We did it using the above method and it worked a treat, but your experience may vary!

jules.