We just did a major overhaul on a website, and in doing so, changed the directory structure drastically. We switched from long ugly query strings to clean urls. What I'd like to know is what is the best way to tell google about my changed urls? mod_rewrite? My old URLS look like:
http://www.example.com/Merchant2/mercha ... y_Code=MDB
My new urls look like
http://www.example.com/product/verbose- ... oduct-name
I want to be careful not to screw anything up because our google rankings jumped drastically from this change, but there are still old urls indexed because we didn't take down the old store yet.
The thing is, the category names have changed, and I've added a product-name to the end of the url. I'd like to just tell google that anything pointing to /Merchant2 should just redirect to http://www.example.com with a 301 or something, but I don't really know the implications of that. SEO experts?
mod_rewrite question relating to seo
Moderator: General Moderators
I typically do a 301 through mod_rewrite in these situations for 3 reasons.
Usability. Users landing from an old URL they found through a search engine get to a useful, and hopefully very related, page.
SEO. 301 means moved permanently, which Google uses in the best way possible. If only the URL changes but the page content is almost identical Google doesn't seem to penalize. I've done it often with no problems. But if you're going to bounce to the home page I'd send a 404 so it's properly removed from the index and Google doesn't consider it duplicate content.
Performance. Taking care if it through mod_rewrite means no special code to handle it within the application and less hits to PHP.
Usability. Users landing from an old URL they found through a search engine get to a useful, and hopefully very related, page.
SEO. 301 means moved permanently, which Google uses in the best way possible. If only the URL changes but the page content is almost identical Google doesn't seem to penalize. I've done it often with no problems. But if you're going to bounce to the home page I'd send a 404 so it's properly removed from the index and Google doesn't consider it duplicate content.
Performance. Taking care if it through mod_rewrite means no special code to handle it within the application and less hits to PHP.