SEO Question: Will changing URL structure affect me big time?

Hello everyone,

I am currently running a blog (wordpress) and the current URL structure (permalink) is domain.com/category/post-title . I am getting a new design implemented and I'd REALLY like to change my URL structure to domain.com/date/post-title. The reason why I am doing this is because as my number of posts increase, I have a very high chance of repeating title names and I do not want that to happen. The problem is... a couple of my posts receive heavy google traffic and I do not want to jeopardize that. How can I go about making this transition with minimal google SERP damage?

Thanks in advance for the help..

 

I would usually have said a good, clean 301 redirect, but my last site lost 80k pages on changing and Google still has the old pages indexed. Technically it should work. Technically.

 

i suggest you do a 301 redirect from your old URL to the new URL

 

In my opinion, you can't keep both advantages (keep indexed pages + change the URL rule). So, I think you should disallow robots from spidering your site for a while until you make the change and then allow it again.
Moreover, I would think you should remove your current indexed pages from google. This way, you will not be subject to the duplicate content penalty.

 

I am sorry but could you explain to me why I should enable spiders only after the trasition? What's the difference? I am not sure I quite understand this.

 

301 sounds good... but I guess I will still be losing pages no matter what? That's a bummer

 

I don't understand why you want to get rid of the category directory structure. I recently switched my blog over to the category directory structure and even though I have thousands and thousands of posts I only had a few dup titles.

Someone tell me if I am wrong here, but having the category in the url is also a chance to gain a little more search juice as long as the categories are well thought out.

 

Hi there, to answer your post:

1. My focus is on adding the 'date' directory structure to avoid dupes.
2. I would like to get rid of my category from the structure because my google adsense seems to pull ads related to my category and does not seem to put more weight into the post title. When I was experimenting with this new structure (without category) on another blog, I was able to pull relevant google adsense ads. Currently, most of my posts are seeing the same ads over and over again. Is there a way to put more weight into post titles or content for google adsense to pull contextual ads from?

 

I did exactly same thing a month ago and I now have big problem: google maintains old pages as supplemental results, new pages still aren't indexed.