SEO Question - Changing Established Domain's Inner URLs

[JanWalker]

Hi there,

Have an important question in regards to changing 20 inner url's for a very established domain (when I say established I mean 5 years).

The reason I'm wanting to change obviously is because they are not currently optimized (e.g website.com/dog1.html instead of website.com/dog-toys)

The problem is that there is some ok bad and ugly seo. So some page are bottom of first page, others 2nd and 3 and others not in top 100. So I mean obviously there is already established seo for these non-optimized urls...

So how do I go about changing these urls to optimize but not lose the SEO and let google know??

Please let me know your thoughts!

Thanks!

[freddyfortunes]

Your question is too long and confusing for most people here...that`s why no replies...

[Rus Sells]

Hi Jan,

First thing fist is to copy down all the URL's you want to change, to something like notepad.

If this happens to be on Wordpress you can go to each page or post and edit them individually to be more SEO friendly.

If you have these on a regular HTML site you can download them and rename then, then upload them again. Make sure to also update your site navigation.

Why copy the old URL's? They are most likely indexed in the search engines so....

If you have Wordpress you should install a 301 redirect plugin and enter in each of the old urls and have them redirect to their updated new URL.

If you have an html site you'll need to log into the hosting account admin panel, usually Cpanel and use their 301 redirect tool to point all the old URL's to the new ones.

That's it!

[yaheem]

Are those pages that you want to change their urls ranking as you described in your post (bottom of 1st page, 2nd, 3rd .. etc.)?

If yes then you have two options:

1. To keep building back links to those pages and forget about the url thing, or
2. Forget about what you achieved so far and do them right from the ground up, fixing the urls, title and h1 tags, keyword density, and still you'll have to keep building back links (not forever unless your competition is doing it).

The first option takes longer and in competitive markets (like the dog market in your example) it will not work alone. The second would be my choice, especially that your domain is an aged one, and if it has a good page rank you don't need to worry about losing what you have now because your gains will be faster and more stable.

Finally, this is all based on the algorithms currently employed by big G, and they change them everyday, sometimes more than once. But so far building back links in a natural way and adding pages to my sites (with anchored links to the home page) is always enough to get my sites back to the top after being slapped.

By the way, you can also add more pages with the old content after you rewrite them, and this time optimize the urls for the new pages.

[JanWalker]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your replies. Sorry but I think my question was fairly clear to be honest.

Rug - yes I've done that part and just to confirm it's a html site unfort and not wordpress. So will have to do the 301 direct...not sure how to do this but will have to figure it out.

Question to you both though - ok so the 301 direct will go to the new url but won't google still forever show the old un optimized url? (i.e losing small points for not being optimized).

I mean I can see what the 301 direct would do but can't see this helping SEO.

Yaheem - I'm actually doing this for a close friend and wanting to do option 2 and get it right. I'm worried about these keywords dropping in the rankings though as they have 5 years of authority and backlinks!

Also, I realize google is decreasing the relevancy of exact match domains (in my opinion) but I believe optimized url's for other pages (apart from home page) will still be important.

Please let me know guys!

[jewel3000]

I don't really have an answer to your question. Just want to share that I've just started dealing with this same issue.

A "wild, wild" SEO guy I used "fixed" my URL file name without really allowing me to okay it. True, what he did made all the sense in the world, as the new URL now has my keyword phrase in it.

But now, I'm realizing after-the-fact what impact this change will have on my page rank. The original URL has all sorts of backlinks leading into it, and that bothers me a lot. The page was now saying something like "no information found."

Since I don't know how to set up a redirect myself, I simply:
-- copy-pasted the text again to my original but now dead-end page,
-- tweaked the copy to make it 70% original, and
-- published it live again.

Hopefully, this will salvage all the traffic and page rank I originally had.

Is this something you could try, too?

It's a lot of work if you have MANY pages that need a redirect. But in my case, I'm hoping 1) the corrected URL file name will get a decent page rank, and 2) I'll have double the chance of traffic, now that I have 2 "sort of similar" versions of the page.

Anyone have any thoughts about how I'm resolving the same problem Jan Walker has?

[JanWalker]

Yeah guys please respond on this! Questions were not answered!

Thx

[SEO ibiza]

Originally Posted by JanWalker

Hi guys,

Thanks for your replies. Sorry but I think my question was fairly clear to be honest.

Rug - yes I've done that part and just to confirm it's a html site unfort and not wordpress. So will have to do the 301 direct...not sure how to do this but will have to figure it out.

Question to you both though - ok so the 301 direct will go to the new url but won't google still forever show the old un optimized url? (i.e losing small points for not being optimized).

I mean I can see what the 301 direct would do but can't see this helping SEO.

Yaheem - I'm actually doing this for a close friend and wanting to do option 2 and get it right. I'm worried about these keywords dropping in the rankings though as they have 5 years of authority and backlinks!

Also, I realize google is decreasing the relevancy of exact match domains (in my opinion) but I believe optimized url's for other pages (apart from home page) will still be important.

Please let me know guys!

super easy, log in via FTP and add / edit the .htaccess file with 301 redirects old page to new. they look like this.

redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.domain.com/newpage.html

more reading Htaccess 301 redirect tutorial - AssistProgramming.com - Programming Tips & Tricks

google will follow the redirect and replace old page with new in the index.

and keywords in urls have some tiny weighting, so use if you can, but don't stress because its so small as to be virtually insignificant, although there is some evidence you get better clickthrough rates with nice urls than messy ones.