Changing URL patterns (many dynamic pages)

What would best practices be?

[madeonmoon]

Hey all,

I have a dilemma that I am looking to get some advice on:

My site has 24k pages indexed in Google. All of the pages are articles that users submit. My current URLs have this pattern:

www.example.org/articlelist and www.example.org/articlelist/id/<articleid>

What I'd like to do is to make the URLs use this pattern instead:

www.example.org/articles and www.example.org/articles/<articleid>/Article-About-Blue-Widgets

I am using mod_rewrite already and am planning to continue using it. How would you handle the change (given that you'd recommend the change at all)? My main concern is a) not losing any traffic in the interim and b) no dup content from Google in case I decide to make the old URLs functional but not linked to.

A lot of the current URLs have a non-zero PR. So, I assume I will end up losing some traffic in at least till the next PR update due to my new linking to zero-PR pages while dropping links to the higher PR pages.

Thanks for any input!
James

[encyclo]

Sounds like a lot of pain for not much gain, James. OK I can see that with the benefit of hindsight you might prefer URLs which are a bit more keyword-rich, but now the pages are well-established, why change? There are so many other things you can do to help your pages' performance, the URL is only a small part.

Having said all that, if you use a 301 permanent redirect for each page (and leave it in place indefinitely) it shouldn't take too long to take hold. You've got no advantage from changing the directory name from "articlelist" to "articles", though. Can you compromise and just have new pages use the new URL structure and leave the existing pages where they are?

[DaveAtIFG]

Generally speaking, PR seems to drop a point as you traverse down a directory tree. Eliminating the /id/ or the /<articleid>/ level of directory would probably offer more benefit than what you might gain from "keyword enhancing" your paths or file names.

[madeonmoon]

Hello all,

Thanks to all who replied to this thread :)

The example urls I listed are not exact and the real ones are much worse so the change would be very beneficial.

I am thinking of making it a two step process:

1) 301 redirect example.org/articles/id/25 to example.org/articles/25 and use the latter for internal linking. this will result in better urls and, hopefully, boost in PR since one of the subfolders is gone.

2) perhaps sometime later start using example.org/articles/25/All-About-Blue-Widgets for internal linking. no need for any redirects since search engines will reach the page whether the url invoked contains the article title or not.