Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If I have an url of a webpage:
.....com?cat=200&subcat=10&id=123
Now, if I change the above url to new url:
.....com?cat=200&id=123
If Google sees the old url, I will redirect it to
the new url. Do I get any penalty?
Thanks,
John
If Google sees the old url, I will redirect it to the new url.
I would suggest a 301 redirect for everyone, not just Google. That is a standard practice and in itself doesn't necessarily bring a penalty. But trying to redirect just Google might.
Changing URLs might bring you a drop in serps anyway. But it will most probably recover within a few months.
If you're going to change your URLs anyway. Why not using a SE friendly one like www.widget.com/article-headline-123.html?
I've a similar situation. What you can do is to accept the old query strings and the shorter query strings. Both urls will return http code 200 and no need any redirection.
Sounds like sure Dup content penualty recipe to me
Google will soon notice that the old query strings are no longer existed on your site after few round of crawls. G will eventually drop the old links off from the serp and replace it with the new links due to the duplication rule.
Use friendly urls like /name_of_the_product.html
Google will soon notice that the old query strings are no longer existed on your site after few round of crawls. G will eventually drop the old links off from the serp and replace it with the new links due to the duplication rule.
Life is not that easy in most cases. If an URL is not mentioned anymore, Google often does not remove it from the index, but instead makes the URL supplemental [webmasterworld.com] which is in this case worse than useless. The URL may still pop up for search queries which match the content from the old URL, but not from the new, if you ever change the content of that specific page.
Proper use of 301 redirects and robot meta tags can help to prevent this happening but are no life insurance.
