The impact of changing URLs? Beware you may kill your SEO!

The impact of changing URLs for web pages is potentially catastrophic to SEO. There are good reasons for wanting to change a URL but it needs to be done carefully to try to reduce the likelihood of serious harm to your search engine rankings.

What is a URL?

The address of a web page (or image or file) is called a URL (Universal Resource Locator).

For example: URL = https://www.epsilis.co.uk/contact-us/ where

• https:// = protocol (most websites are https these days as that is more secure than the old http so most sites have already been through this pain).
• www.epsilis.co.uk = the domain (can be with or without www and lots of options instead of .co.uk)
• contact-us = the slug or the permalink (this can be more complicated).

If you want a much more detailed explanation of a URL try Wikipedia.

Note: When I am talking about changing the URL in this article I am really only talking about changing the slug – the unique bit that refers specifically to the individual page as in “contact-us”.

Changing the domain is a whole lot more risky and should be avoided.

Changing a URL from a Search Engines perspective

If you change the URL of a web page then from the search engines perspective you have created a new web page and deleted the old web page. So you have reset any SEO credit your page has built up back to zero.

New web pages do not carry the same weight in the search rankings as web pages that have been around for a while. So it is likely to take quite a long time (perhaps 6 months to a year) before your ‘new’ web page gets to where your “old” page was in the search rankings, if it ever does!

So, don’t change a web page URL unless you have a good reason for doing so and in the knowledge that your search rankings could be badly affected.

Are URLs important for SEO?

URLs and web page titles are important ranking features in SEO. They should be highly relevant to the page content to help the user and search engine know where they are going.

URLs should:

• Be simple and descriptive.
• Separate words with hyphens (not underscores).
• Include the most important Keywords for that page.
• Use lowercase.
• Not be too long, so try for 2 to 5 words.
• Not include any special characters.

URLs should be chosen very carefully to get the best search ranking for each of your web pages.

In WordPress, when you create a new PAGE or POST, the URL is generated automatically for you when PUBLISHED based on the TITLE unless you override it. So it is best to get this right from the outset.

A checklist of things to do when changing URLs

• Use 301 Redirects: Add 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL. This is an instruction to the search engines indicating your page has permanently moved. If you are lucky Google will respond positively to the change, transfer (some of) the SEO value from the old URL to the new one and not impose any significant long-term loss of rankings. But there will inevitably be short-term losses.
  But avoid chains of redirects – redirecting page A to page B and then redirecting page B to page C.
• Update Internal Links: Update all your internal links from the old URL to the new URL.
  Don’t leave it to the redirect, whilst this will prevent a broken link, relying on the redirect may devalue the link. Check within your content as well as the navigation, headers and footers .
• Update External Links: Where practical, ask other websites that link to your old URL to update to your new URL.
• Update Your Sitemap: Submit an updated sitemap to search engines. This helps search engines index the new URLs more quickly.

After changing URLs monitor the effect

After the change: monitor the 301 redirects to ensure they are effective and look out for any broken links (404 page not found errors) that you can correct.

Keep an eye on your website’s traffic and search engine rankings to access the impact.

Be patient, but take prompt action if it is clear that corrections are required and improvements can be made.

Conclusion: Impact of changing URLs

Changing web page URLs is risky and could have a damaging effect on your Google rankings but there may be good reasons for doing so.

However doing it for SEO reasons is unlikely to be beneficial and may cause significant harm to your rankings.

Changing URLs should only be done if there is a good reason and everything possible done to mitigate lower search engine rankings as a result.