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.
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
-
Hi Moz Community,
We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com
When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it.
Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise.
We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu.
So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced.
My questions are:
- If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page?
- Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way?
- Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow?
Thanks so much for your help!
-
@taralp I know this is an old post but I was looking at redoing my site and URL structure myself.
My concern was losing rankings with drastic changes also. But I ran the site through a SEO tool and it looks like since this post that not only did you not HURT your rankings, the rankings skyrocketed since then,
If you are still around, may I ask were there any other changes to the site around that same time? How long did it take to make the change?
For others that may be reading this. Does Google still take URL structure changes so kindly? Will a simple redirect plugin for WordPress do the trick if I make category and url changes myself?
I want to remove "category" from the slug also and I want to merge and delete some categories and add others.
Thanks!
-
Thank you!
-
Hi Tara,
The best way would be to 301 redirect the old urls to the new urls. So if your url is https://sitename/category/product and you want to change it to https://sitename/product then you must 301 redirect https://sitename/category/product ----> https://sitename/product so you do not loose link juice or receive an enormous amount of 404s.
Thanks,
Don Silvernail
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will critical error in wordpress for memory limit affect seo rankings?
will critical error in wordpress to increase memory limit affect seo rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gamstopbet0 -
Will I loose from SEO if I rename my urls to be more keyword friendly?
As a good practice of SEO is to have your keywords in the links. I am thinking of doing some optimization and change my urls to more effective keywords. I am using shopify and there is an option (a tick) that you can check while changing the url (ex. for a category, for a product, for a blog post). This will give a redirection to the old post to the new. Is it good practice? Is it risky for losing SEO or it will help to rank higher because I will have better keywords in my links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spiros.im0 -
Could another site copying my content hurt my ranking?
Earlier this week I asked why a page of mine might not be ranking locally. (https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/what-could-be-stopping-us-from-ranking-locally). Maybe this might be part of the answer – another firm has copied huge chunks of my website copy: **My company: **https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/ The other company: http://studio3dm.com/studio3dm-com/video/ Could this be causing my page to not rank? And is there anything I can do about it, other than huff and puff to the other firm? (Which I am already doing.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagster0 -
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
How does Infinite Scrolling work with unique URLS as users scroll down? And is this SEO friendly?
I was on a site today and as i scrolled down and viewed the other posts that were below the top one i read, i noticed that each post below the top one had its own unique URL. I have not seen this and was curious if this method of infinite scrolling is SEO friendly. Will Google's spiders scroll down and index these posts below the top one and index them? The URLs of these lower posts by the way were the same URLs that would be seen if i clicked on each of these posts. Looking at Google's preferred method for Infinite scrolling they recommend something different - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html . Welcome all insight. Thanks! Christian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :  changed to 
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0