Changing The Url Structure – Word Of Caution To Webmasters

Its obvious that when we design a website or design a web blog we need the url structure of the website to be search engine friendly and also user friendly. But there are some critical issues involved when you change the structure of your url in your websites and blog if you don’t follow the webmaster guidelines properly regarding changing the structure of your url.

I personally faced a penalization from Google on one of my blogs so I really know that if you don’t do these changes properly you may be victim of penalization too, so I am going to make things easy for you to understand what should be done when you change the structure of your url mainly in blogs. Obviously I learned the lesson the hard way but I don’t want others to be in similar situation where I was once.

1. First step is prevention is better than cure so just when you start a new blog or website make plans for your url structure as well as it plays an important role in SEO. Just make sure you are going to follow the same url structure forever and you are not going to change it in future. changing your url structure often will cost you dearly in search rankings so I just don’t recommend you to change the structure of your url often if not never.

2. Before we go on there is something I need to tell you some facts, When I first opened a blog I was following a particular url structure and of course its not that bad structure after all but I was deceived by someone who is supposedly a wordpress geek so I followed his guidelines and changed my url structure. So what happened? So far all the links which were being indexed by Google had a particular url structure and now I got a new url structure. So what really happened? as the url structure was new Google started to index the contents which are already indexed so this practically made my indexed pages count to be doubled but you may think its a good sign but in fact its not because its against webmaster guidelines and could seriously impact my rankings search results and in fact it did impact my search results and rankings as Google penalized me for duplicate contents.

3. So just keep in mind that if you are changing your url structure just make sure you redirect the old url to the new ones with 301 redirects that way you are letting know the search engines that this is the new url and change the results to this url instead of old ones.

4. If you fail to redirect your old urls to the new ones then you could possibly be penalized for duplicate contents which you definitely don’t want to happen to your blogs or websites. I would highly recommend just don’t change your url structure keep it as such once search engine spiders have started to crawl on your site why do you take the pain of redirecting your urls now and then? its a pain the neck trust me.

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