Noob question about URLs
- SEO |
Hey Guys,
I just got my website redone as we now have multiple cities we offer our services in. Each city link leads to a page with links to biographies of sales reps we have in those cities. Obviously each of these city pages are important pages, with a lot of content linking to them (sales rep bios).
However, my old website, didn't have this but we were still trying to rank for cities. Here's what I mean.
We would try to rank for Calgary Lawn Mower, we made a landing page but we did it with just a page that you couldn't get to unless you clicked on the specific link you found in the search results or entered the url. It wasn't linked to from the main page of the site or even sub pages. It was all by itself.
Obviously that's bad for SEO and confusing to customers so we changed it.
My issue is, my web developer setup the new site url for the cities to look like this:
http://mycompany/locations/vancouver
I want to change this domain to be http://mycompany/locations/vancouver-lawn-mower
I am not trying to rank for vancouver, I am trying to rank for vancouver lawn mower so that is why I want to make the change. There is no sense in leaving this powerful page with lots of internal backlinks as locations/vancouver and a page with no internal backlinks and really no purpose except some text as vancouver-lawn-mower.
The issue is that the locations/vancouver page isn't ranking and the vancouver-lawn-mower page is ranking and ranking well.
Will it hurt me to change that url from locations/vancouver to be renamed as vancouver-lawn-mower and then delete the old page?
Can we do that without affecting rankings?
Any thoughts?
I just got my website redone as we now have multiple cities we offer our services in. Each city link leads to a page with links to biographies of sales reps we have in those cities. Obviously each of these city pages are important pages, with a lot of content linking to them (sales rep bios).
However, my old website, didn't have this but we were still trying to rank for cities. Here's what I mean.
We would try to rank for Calgary Lawn Mower, we made a landing page but we did it with just a page that you couldn't get to unless you clicked on the specific link you found in the search results or entered the url. It wasn't linked to from the main page of the site or even sub pages. It was all by itself.
Obviously that's bad for SEO and confusing to customers so we changed it.
My issue is, my web developer setup the new site url for the cities to look like this:
http://mycompany/locations/vancouver
I want to change this domain to be http://mycompany/locations/vancouver-lawn-mower
I am not trying to rank for vancouver, I am trying to rank for vancouver lawn mower so that is why I want to make the change. There is no sense in leaving this powerful page with lots of internal backlinks as locations/vancouver and a page with no internal backlinks and really no purpose except some text as vancouver-lawn-mower.
The issue is that the locations/vancouver page isn't ranking and the vancouver-lawn-mower page is ranking and ranking well.
Will it hurt me to change that url from locations/vancouver to be renamed as vancouver-lawn-mower and then delete the old page?
Can we do that without affecting rankings?
Any thoughts?