Q: We were advised by an SEO consultant to change all URLs of our 4-year old website as we do not use keywords in page names. It is a fairly static website and we get a few hundred visitors per month from search engines according to Google Analytics. I would like to know if changing page URLs will prove beneficial to our traffic.
A: Most likely not. We recommend leaving those URLs as they are, and focus your SEO efforts on tasks that will actually prove valuable for
both users and search engines - such as creating relevant content on a regular basis. Here’s why:
- The fact you are already receiving traffic from search engines
indicates your pages are crawled and indexed. If you truly have page indexing issues, you should analyze and correct those on an individual page basis - While using keywords in filenames may provide additional clues to search engines, destroying long established popularity for
existing pages is simply not worthwhile. The effort necessary to do these type of modifications may be significant, especially if you have a large number of
pages. If you do however decide to change those URLs, use 301 redirects to transfer link popularity from the old pages to the new ones - In case you are using dynamic pages (e.g. using a content
management system to build your website), today’s search engines can
easily crawl URLs with multiple query parameters. Unless you are suffering from a case of extremely long URLs with large number of parameters,
or URLs using session IDs that may trigger duplicate content issues, we recommend maintaining the existing URLs
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Mike Lascut is Principal of Single Entry Point® Marketing, focusing on the search, email and analytics practice and leading the development of the 