Hello experts, I have links of various inner pages scatered around like domain.com/abc123.html domain.com/def123.html domain.com/ghi123.html Now i want to put them like domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html domain.com/alphabets/def123.html domain.com/alphabets/ghi123.html By putting like that ? Will affect my SEO work ? i mean since already google has cached the above links.. and back-linking has been done for the previous links. So what is the best way to do ? and putting them like domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html - will it help in anyway for if keyword search in google alphabets abc
You must 301 Redirect the old URLs to the new ones. If you do so you will not lose any in-bound link "juice"
If you change a URL for a web page, you should 301 redirect the old URL to its new URL as tj241 indicated. If your site is hosted on an Apache web server then you should have access to an Apache module called Mod_Rewrite. Using this utility you can place .htaccess files in folders on your web server. These .htaccess files can contain directives to tell the web server to do 301 redirects, 302 redirects, and a variety of URL rewriting. Using your example above, you could implement the 301 redirects using the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web by including the following directives in the file:
Will this change affects the SEO ? SERP ? or anything else..?? google will fall the pages or something??
You are aware that inbound links, ESPECIALLY those from other sites, tend to have the MOST influence on how a page ranks in the SERPs for a particular keyword phrase, right? For example, assume domain.com/abc123.html had 100 external URLs that linked to it (in additiona to the internal pages on the site that link to it) and it ranked on page 1 of the SERPs. If you suddently moved domain.com/abc123.html to domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html and changed the links on your site to point to domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html but did NOT implement a 301 redirect then the following would happen: 1) People following links from the other 100 sites to your old domain.com/abc123.html would now get a 404 Not Found error from your web server when the request the domain.com/abc123.html page because it no longer exists. 2) Likewise, when search engines follow those 100 links to domain.com/abc123.html they will begin getting 404 Not Found errors. If they continue getting 404s for an extended period of time they will typically deindex domain.com/abc123.html. 3) Your new page at domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html is starting all over trying to rank because it has only inbound links from other pages on your site. It's not getting credit for the 100 extra links the old page also had from the 100 external sites. By implementing a 301 redirect from domain.com/abc123.html to domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html you are telling the search engines that domain.com/abc123.html has permanently moved. They will transfer credit to the new domain.com/alphabets/abc123.html page for all inbound links to the old domain.com/abc123.html page. Once Google recrawls ALL 100 inbound links to the old page, the new page will have received credit for all of the old page's links thus helping it to rank much higher. If you'd like to learn more, you can check out my post on redirecting web pages with 301 redirects.