Best Practice For Switching to Keyword Based URLs

[Rawrishly]

I have an ecommerce site that I am in the process of switching over to keyword based urls rather than using IDs. So, rather than having URLs with modelid={x}, makeid={x}, categoryid={x}, etc, our URLs will now be model={modelname}, make={makename}, category={categoryname}, and so on and so forth.

This site is close to 20 years old, so it has these ID based URLs linked all over the place. Due to this fact, we will continue to support the old url structure. The plan was to switch our sitemap and all the internal links over to the new keyword based structure while still accepting the old structure as well. Is this enough to alert Google of the change, or will they see this as duplicate content for the old URLs? Should we be using canonical tags in a situation like this? Redirects? Any input on the situation would be appreciated.

[brotherhood of LAN]

What benefits are you hoping to reap from the URL structure change? Do you think it'll give a small ranking boost, or perhaps it's more user-friendly to have a descriptive KW in the URL?

A 301 redirect from old URLs to new URLs should be suffice. Using a canonical is no bad thing, it can provide that extra reassurance.

IMHO unless you feel it's of benefit to the user, I'd keep the old structure, just a suggestion. This [w3.org] is an old piece of advice but one I've always kept in mind.

[Rawrishly]

While it would be nice to get a ranking boost for it, it wasn't our intention. Our reason to change was because our URLs look like gibberish and we were hoping get better CTR in the organic search results by having a URL that seemed to be more obviously relevant to what the user was searching for. We already tried using more keyword friendly display URLs in AdWords and it really seemed to help, so we were hoping to see the same results with changing our URL structure. However, I can see where you're coming from.

Thank you for the response!

[lucy24]

My snap response on seeing the subject title was: Don't bother.

So, rather than having URLs with modelid={x}, makeid={x}, categoryid={x}, etc, our URLs will now be model={modelname}, make={makename}, category={categoryname}, and so on and so forth.

Honestly I don't see any difference. Now, if you were changing from

example.com/index.php?modelid=123&makeid=456&categoryid=78

to

example.com/widgets/blue/sprockets

then that could be helpful to humans. But the way you're describing your proposed changes seems like needless work.

[Rawrishly]

So you don't think it's worth changing our URL structure from example.com/index.php?modelid=123&makeid=456&categoryid=78 to example.com/index.php?model=Model-Name&make=Make-Name&category=Category-Name?
Are you of the opinion that the query string itself is just too unreadable in the first place, whereas when you have the example.com/category/make/model it's worth it since it doesn't have all the extra stuff along with it? Maybe we'll have to look into doing our URLs that way.

[netmeg]

I don't think it's worth it. I'm in the process of taking one ecommerce site back FROM using keywords to just using SKUs for the page names.

[Rawrishly]

To be honest, that's a little disappointing to hear. We were really hoping that changing our URLs might help us out a little with our CTR. May I ask why you decided to switch back, Netmeg? Did it not have the intended effect for you, or was the new URL scheme more of a headache than what it was worth?

[netmeg]

Well it wasn't new; we first implemented it in 2010. I can't see that it made any different at all (this is a Magento ecommerce site with about 5000 products) But it made for a HUGE internal issue (let's just call it a nightmare) getting the people adminning the store to maintain any kind of consistency. Since there didn't seem to be any measurable SEO benefit, it seemed just as easy to go all SKUs all the time (except for the categories) and that will make it a ton easier for the people adding product. We're relaunching the whole store this summer anyway, so it seemed a good time to do it.

[Rawrishly]

We're still doing the products themselves by SKU (we're nearing 25 million products as we specialize in used/remanufactured items and have a only small fraction of replenishable inventory-it would be near impossible to get unique names for each one). The new URL scheme we wanted to implement was for our search page: we have many categories/filters to narrow the results and that's where we were hoping to use the keywords.

[netmeg]

Uh. Are you talking about allowing your search pages into Google? I would strongly advise against that. Google's been quite clear that they do not want search results pages in the index.

[Rawrishly]

I understand where you're coming from, but that's the way our entire niche operates. When people do a search in google our niche, they're looking for a set of listings rather than a product page. We have literally thousands of products that are almost the same thing except for the tiny details since everything is used. It's somewhat similar to searching for a used iPhone 5 and having eBay or Amazon return their listing page for their used iPhone 5s but in our niche it's possibly even more of a need to return a listing page rather than a detail page. Maybe I'm operating under the wrong impression here, but I thought that was allowable. Google doesn't really index anyone's detail pages for our niche because the pages only last for a limited period of time before the item sells, and users only ever link to our search results, not our product pages.

[netmeg]

Good luck to you.

[fathom]

You won't improve rank nor traffic nor will you improve sale performance as laws of diminishing returns apply nor will this have any impact on user experience.

This is merely a make work project to create billable employment hours.