Changing the URL of established indexed pages

[Luxoria]

I just launched my ecommerce site last month and I am using a mod that uses SEO friend URLs and rewrites.

Instead of store.com?product=4 it writes it as store.com/productname-p-4.html

This is very nice. The URL is generated solely from the product's name and ID. Now I am thinking about added the ability to my store to add other keywords to the URL such as store.com/productname-nautical-theme-p-4.html.

My concern is I have 47 URLS indexed and if I suddenly add those extra keywords to my product URLs in google's eyes I would have say 94 products and 47 complete 100% duplicates. Because even though the URL is changed it is still rewritten and goes to the same product page per product ID.


So, how should I go about adding keywords to the URLs in respect to making google OK with it. In webmasters's tools I can't remove the old format URLs because they are not 404 because of the rewrite/redirect.

[deadsea]

If you 301 redirect store.com/productname-p-4.html to store.com/productname-nautical-theme-p-4.html you should be OK to change the URLs. I have seen large scale URL changes within the same site (not redirecting pages to a new site), that have had no negative impact on search engine traffic. Not even a temporary drop.

I would suggest that removing the product id from the url if possible.
/productname-nautical-theme.html
is a much better url than
/productname-nautical-theme-p-4.html
Simpler looking urls get better click through rates from the SERPs. You might also want to consider dropping the .html (although there is some evidence that having it actually helps click through rate slightly).

I have recently seen evidence that longer urls rank somewhat less well than shorter urls. I'm also not entirely convinced that keywords in urls help you rank as opposed to just help with click through rates do to bolding in the SERPs.

My advice would be to make the url match a two to four word search phrase that people tend to use most often when searching for a product.

So if the product is "SillyCo Twisted Nylon Rope" and the category is "Nautical Rigging": I might make the url something like:
/sillyco-nylon-rigging-rope.html

[valex]

I did that, but for far too many pages and lost almost all my traffic. Obviously I have broken my site's internal linking structure by killing so many well indexed pages. The good thing is that yesterday my traffic returned and now it's even better with the optimized URLs indexed. As deadsea says - don't forget to 301 redirect - the duplicate content could harm your site's SERP even worst. Also don't forget to rebuild your sitemap, disallow the old URLs in your robots.txt and to help the process - remove them from Google's search results. Start linking the new URLs immediately. You may leave everything to Google of course - the 301 redirection will do the trick and the old URLs will drop from the index sooner or later, but sometimes it takes 2-3 weeks to see that G have replaced them.

[indyank]

disallow the old URLs in your robots.txt

!

then how will the 301 redirect work? Note that if you have external links to old urls, you will then loose the votes.

[Luxoria]

Well when it comes to having the product ID in the URL it is how the rewrite engine works, for example here is the related snip in .htaccess for /productname-nautical-theme-p-4.html

RewriteRule ^(.*)-p-(.*).html$ product_info.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}

If I could take those products IDs out I would. I guess I can just make a rewrite rule for every product. IDK.

As valex stated, duplicate content really concerns me. So a 301 will have to be used.

I will try to figure out to 301 the original HTML and still have the rewrites function.

redirect 301 /old/old.html http()//www.mysite.com/new.html

might just work. I am going to try it.

[Luxoria]

Ok, yep. Adding the 301 from oldname.html to newname.html works with the rewrites and product pages come up just fine.

Now that I know this works I need to write my PHP code for custom URLs and add all my changes in .htaccess. I am glad I am doing this now with only a few urls than latter with 100+.

From what I gather it will take a few weeks for the old URLs to wash out.

Only one major question remains... could it be too much?!

Title = Nautical Theme Product
Meta Keywords = Nautical Theme Product, Ocean, Sea, Water
Meta Description = Nautical Theme Products all day long.
H1 = Nautical Theme Product
H2 = Nautical Product in Blue
H3 = Nautical Ocean Pants
Description = I love nautical theme products.
Insite link = Nautical Themes, Ocean Themes, Sea Themes

Could that be going too far?