I'm in the process of redesigning a site that's a few years old now and i'm not sure whether to change the page urls or whether to leave them as they are. At present the urls are formatted as: http://www.mysite.com/article.php?id=53456 and are indexed quite well in Google. I've been researching alternative URL formats to avoid having the dynamic element in there and am swithering over whether to keep the existing format or redirect the pages to one of these static equivalents: Short and to the point: http://www.mysite.com/articles/53456.html Keyword-rich but a lot longer than the original dynamic url: http://www.mysite.com/articles/53456/title-of-the-article-that-can-be-quite-long.html The static urls hide the "php" extension and are a lot neater, but is it really worth changing to a static alternative as far as SEO is concerned ? If so and if you were changing your urls which of these would you pick and why ? Thanks.
Hey, I am of the mindset that if something isn't broken, don't fix it. However, that being noted- there is an opportunity to experiment. When you write, "indexed quite well," you mean that your rankings are high in SERPs based on the KWs you use? SEO is a fickle beast: my first boss always said, "a good optimization on a first page ranking may bring you from #7 to #5, but a bad one has the potential of dropping it off the map completely." Maybe take one of your less important pages and try the switch. See what happens, if anything at all. If it were me, I would go for short and sweet. These sorts of urls, "http://www.mysite.com/articles/53456/title-of-the-article-that-can-be-quite-long.html," IMO, are tacky - most especially if your article titles do-tend-to-be-quite-long-and/or-not-necessarily-completely-relevant. I should say, though, that I tend to be on the 'conservative' side of SEO. I wish you luck, and keep us posted! Regards, -E
Yes the pages using the existing urls are doing well in the SERPS which is why i'm a bit reluctant to change them, if they are 301 redirected will Google penalise them at all or just treat the new urls with equal weight ? Another possibility would be to have both versions of the url pointing to the same article - but could that cause duplication issues ? A third option would be to have new articles use static urls and leave the old ones as they are. Ahh decisions decisions.
I think you should go with the third option, if your present pages are really indexed well [mainly to avoid duplication issues]. It is always beneficial to have keywords in title and url.
My 2c would be - if they're doing well, don't change them. I think it is better to avoid 301s, if you can - especially in this case, where duplicate content doesn't require it. The shorter the path (for the spiders), the better. If you redirect your pages, it just adds another step to the crawling process, and it also adds the same process to the sites linking to you. I will stand by my original recommendation - if it ain't broke, don't fix it Best of luck! -E ps. if you do redesign, for the love of god dont make the same mistake I did once: make sure that all the links on your old page find some space on the new one - it would be a shame to lose them, and all the people you're linking to/ to you.
I tend to agree... If it ain't broken don't fix it. Having the SEO friendly URLs that contain the targeted keyword phrases for each page would likely help a little. And it may increase your click-thru-rate (CTR) in the organic SERPs since a good title, good snippet, and good URL can ALL contribute to increasing CTRs. If I were going through the trouble of converting to SEO friendly static URLs I'd figure out how to make them of the form: It shouldn't really be much more difficult than what you're suggesting but I don't know the platform and/or CMS your using and how flexible it is. If you're going to rewrite URLs then I would go extensionless and simply end each URL w/ a '/'. Many CMSs do this and I've grown to love it. Everything is nice and clean. If you're redesigning your web site, you might find some usefult tips in this post on site redesign and SEO. I just went through the process with a PR7 site w/ 4000+ URLs a year ago and this post was a "lessons learned" kind of post from that redesign project.