Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Changing menus regularly - will this impact SEO
- 
					
					
					
					
 We are working on an internal project, where the website owner is thinking of making regular changes to one or two items on the top level menu. Assuming they redirect the original pages or navigate to them in other ways, is there any other impact on SEO to changing the menu structure? I assume they'd submit new sitemaps after each change. Many thanks Fiona 
- 
					
					
					
					
 That depends on how often users come to the site. If 90% of visitors are new the UX issue doesn't exist. If 5% are then you'll soon get feedback as to whether it is driving them nuts or not  
- 
					
					
					
					
 Your welcome, good luck with the project  
- 
					
					
					
					
 Thanks - that's really helpful. Yes, I did point out that the UX is going to be a major issue as the users will feel like they are walking on shifting sands... I think we are hoping to push the "What's hot" idea, as you suggest. Thanks again 
- 
					
					
					
					
 Hmmmm, I think it could slightly affect the internal linking structure and possible mean the loss of important pages being linked together. However my main concern would be to regular users from a UX perspective. You are clearly going to be making people work a lot harder to find regular content that is possbly the bread and butter traffic for the site. Rather than changing the menu, would it not be better to implement a "New Item" in the menu structure rather than changing it all. Or have a feature banner. Hope this helps a little. 
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
- 
		
		Moz ToolsChat with the community about the Moz tools. 
- 
		
		SEO TacticsDiscuss the SEO process with fellow marketers 
- 
		
		CommunityDiscuss industry events, jobs, and news! 
- 
		
		Digital MarketingChat about tactics outside of SEO 
- 
		
		Research & TrendsDive into research and trends in the search industry. 
- 
		
		SupportConnect on product support and feature requests. 
Related Questions
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Domain Masking SEO Impact
 I hope I am explaining this correctly. If I need to provide any clarity please feel free to ask. We currently use a domain mask on an external platform that points back to our site. We are a non-profit and the external site allows users to create peer-to peer fundraisers that benefit our ministry. Currently we get many meta issues related to this site as well as broken links when fundraisers expire etc. We do not have a need to rank for the information from this site. Is there a way to index these pages so that they are not a part of the search engine site crawls as it relates to our site? Technical SEO | | SamaritansPurse0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
 Hey Moz, It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis! I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly. Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles. So the situation is this. Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/ Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf So to note, the product ID will always remain the same. Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal. So the potential solution we thought was: we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux. Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input! Many Thanks Technical SEO | | MH-UK0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Non-Existent Parent Pages SEO Impact
 Hello, I'm working with a client that is creating a new site. They currently are using the following URL structure: http://clientname.com/products/furry-cat-muffins/ But the landing page for the directory /products/ does not actually have any content. They have a similar issue for the /about/ directory where the menu actually sends you to /about/our-story/ instead of /about/. Does it hurt SEO to have the URL structure set up in this way and also does it make sense to create 301 redirects from /about/ to /about/our-story/? Technical SEO | | Alder0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
 Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks Technical SEO | | Jseddon920
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Will Adding Publish Date at end of Page Title for Blog posts Hurt SEO?
 I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO? The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Will a CSS Overflow Scroll for content affect SEO rankings?
 If I use a CSS overflow scroll for copy, will my SEO rankings be affected? Will Google still be able to index my copy accurately and will keywords used in the copy that are covered by the scroll be recognized by Google? Technical SEO | | moliver10220
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
 Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated! Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Changing DNS -- SEO implications?
 Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences? Technical SEO | | stephen_reply0
 
			
		 
			
		 
			
		 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				