How to change site URL structure without affecting SEO?

[belgianguy]

I have a site (wordpress blog) that does really well. I have around 60 pages on it, but now I would like to add a couple of related categories that contain about 400 to 500 post all together.

I read on a couple of blogs that when you create a custom URL structure in wordpress it is better not to do it like this:
mydomain.com/post-name or
mydomain.com/category/post-name

because this generates to many database queries which make your pages load slower and that is one of the factors which determines your ranking.

My URL structure at the moment is: mydomain.com/post-name. Since I only have 60 pages at the moment it does not affect page load times too much (scored 83 on firefox page speed test).

I now have two questions:

1) Will adding 500 to 1000 posts slow my page load time too much with my current URL structure (mydomain.com/post-name) or can I just leave it like that?
2) If I were to change my URL structure too mydomain.com/date/post-name, is there a way to do this without loosing all the effects of my SEO efforts (read:backlinks) or am I going to have to start all over again?


Thank you for your help!

[techconnections]

I am no expert, but EVERY thing I have EVER read about setting up a WordPress site has always said change the permalink settings to the format that you mentioned above. That's how i have all of my sites (about 20) set too. Also, i don't think page load times is based on the number of pages you have, think about websites that have millions of pages, they still load quickly, and i know they have great servers powering them, but it shouldn't make that big of a different. If you are really wanting to have your pages load faster, you could sign up for a good CDN service if you don't have one yet, and make sure you have a cache plugin installed. Hope that helps.

Couple example of sites with a lot of content would be problogger.net and chrisg.com (they may not have millions, but i know it's thousands)

[techconnections]

Oh, and i wouldn't change the permalink structure at all. If you have links pointing to www.yoursite.com/post-name and you change it to www.yoursite.com/date/post-name that link will not longer be active because the link has changed, so Google would find a dead link on your website, a 404 redirect page if you have one in place.

[belgianguy]

Originally Posted by techconnections

I am no expert, but EVERY thing I have EVER read about setting up a WordPress site has always said change the permalink settings to the format that you mentioned above. That's how i have all of my sites (about 20) set too. Also, i don't think page load times is based on the number of pages you have, think about websites that have millions of pages, they still load quickly, and i know they have great servers powering them, but it shouldn't make that big of a different. If you are really wanting to have your pages load faster, you could sign up for a good CDN service if you don't have one yet, and make sure you have a cache plugin installed. Hope that helps.

Couple example of sites with a lot of content would be problogger.net and chrisg.com (they may not have millions, but i know it's thousands)

Page load time is not necessarily based on number of pages you have, but when your structure is mydomain.com/post-name, more search queries are necessary to find that certain post than if your structure would be mydomain.com/date/post-name. That means your page would load faster because less queries are required.

You mention problogger, but that sites URL structure is domain.com/archives/date/post-name. So, that would be a good structure for faster page loading.

[belgianguy]

Originally Posted by techconnections

Oh, and i wouldn't change the permalink structure at all. If you have links pointing to www.yoursite.com/post-name and you change it to www.yoursite.com/date/post-name that link will not longer be active because the link has changed, so Google would find a dead link on your website, a 404 redirect page if you have one in place.

One way to do it would be to use 301 redirects . They pass on link juice, so you would not loose it to a 404 redirect page.

Does anybody have any experience with this? Can I expect a temporary drop in rankings if I do this? Will the 301 redirect pass on 'all' the link juice?

[googlepage1]

Originally Posted by belgianguy

Can I expect a temporary drop in rankings if I do this? Will the 301 redirect pass on 'all' the link juice?

Yes there will be a small decrease in ranking but you can grab the leverage of link via 301.

[preusstang]

Originally Posted by belgianguy

Page load time is not necessarily based on number of pages you have, but when your structure is mydomain.com/post-name, more search queries are necessary to find that certain post than if your structure would be mydomain.com/date/post-name. That means your page would load faster because less queries are required.

You mention problogger, but that sites URL structure is domain.com/archives/date/post-name. So, that would be a good structure for faster page loading.

Sorry bro, but the same number of queries are happening. Just one. Its just a single MySQL query. just possibly more clauses in it.

i.e. SELECT * FROM `posts` WHERE `title` = 'post-name' is the query for the simpler URL.
SELECT * FROM `posts` WHERE `title`='post-name' AND `date` = 'date' is the query for the longer URL.

Same number of queries. Your webpage load time will NOT be effected by the number of blog posts. At least until your number of blog postings exceed the manageable size of a MySQL database (i'm guessing in the 100,000s or maybe even millions)

i would only change your structure (to the longer one) if you start giving posts the same title. make sure to put up 301's. It will be ok

[Trevor]

Use 301 redirects or canonical tags. Both work fine for this purpose, with 301s you don't lose pagerank passed to the old URLs (nor do you do with the latter).