Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

[kirin44355]

Hello good people of the MOZ community,

I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall.

Some examples of the **old **URLS would be

https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html

The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement

https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html

My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine.

The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live.

Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
Is there anything else I am missing?

I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage.

Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski

[Charles-O]

Hey K.

Happy you found value in everyone's response here.

For your URL, I see your structure resemble a blog structure with your subfolder being "learn" instead of "blog". So if it is, your final URL that you described is fine (learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates).
As a counterpoint, if you had this content as a hub page (some form of content pillar/topic cluster) for example, it would've been a good possibility to just change the URL structure since you have many Buying Guides. Different types of content, different ways to put it on your site. 
Like so: /buying-guide/inline-skates

At the end of the day, the structure needs to be logical and reflective of where your content is. I think you got it right anyway.

For the execution part;

1. I would not recommend using the "crawl as Googlebot" function in search console. It would be way too time-consuming for you, and it is not really designed for that kind of work.
2. Instead, update your sitemap with the final URLs and send it again via SearchConsole / Bing Webmastertools.
3. Also, don't forget to go ahead and change the internal links pointing to the old URL to point directly to the new ones or else you'll just have a bunch of 301's crawled by Google. Make it seamless.
4. Monitor. Monitor. Monitor.

Hope that helped!

[kirin44355]

Thanks all the for responses and I am taking to heart all your suggestions. I will make all the URLs lowercase as this is something I didn't take into account.

Due to site hosting platform limitation for the URL structure I need to have a value in the bold areas below:

https://www.inlineskates.com/learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates,default,pg.html

The first value "learn" doesn't have to be unique but the 2nd "learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates" is the driver for the URL and must be unique, so the short URL like https://www.inlineskates.com/buying-guide/Inline-Skates,default,pg.html wouldn't work since I would only be able to use it 1x for inline skates and have several content pieces that I would need to add that to, size guides, charts, etc.

My main concern is about the process of doing the redirects, say I do 50 in one day, what is my next step? Is there a way to run the fetch as googlebot to a handful of pages as I only see the ability to add 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. If I go ahead and do this I just want to do it in the smartest way possible.

Thanks, Chris

[Charles-O]

And to add to that, Moz has a great resource on how to write them (emphasis mine);

• Keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible is key to getting both your users and search engines to understand them.

• URLs should be definitive but concise.

• When necessary for readability, use hyphens to separate words. URLs should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words.

• Use lowercase letters. In some cases, uppercase letters can cause issues with duplicate pages.

• Avoid the use of URL parameters, if possible, as they can create issues with tracking and duplicate content. If parameters need to be used (UTM codes, e.g.), use them sparingly.

Source - https://outdoorsrank.com/learn/seo/url

[EGOL]

The new URLs seem pretty verbose.

If this was my site, I would consider...

https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Kids-Inline-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Hockey-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Aggressive-Skates/

My breadcrumbs would look similar....

Home >> Buying Guide >> Inline Skates

[WebElaine]

I've heard recent claims that you no longer lose link juice when 301ing, but I've also had personal experience with taking a hit to organic traffic when doing this type of major URL restructuring. You're right, in the long run, it does pay off, but you're also right that there may be a ding in the short term.

While you're in there, I would highly, highly recommend taking the additional step of removing ",default,pg" from your URLs. There are two problems with that string - one is it contains commas, which can be problematic. Anything other than plain text and hyphens is generally discouraged in URLs. The other problem is that "default pg" part is watering down your URL and does not contribute to making the links short and easy to type and understand for humans. Since you are undertaking such a massive restructuring, now is the time to make these additional tweaks - as it's less painful to do All The Things at once and take one hit, than it would be to take a hit now and another hit later when you tackle that separately. I personally also always use only lowercase characters in my URLs as it's easier to type and depending on the server OS improper capitalization may make it so they don't reach the right page, but that is more of a UX preference than an SEO enhancement.

Another couple of tips: I find it extremely helpful to map everything out on a spreadsheet in this type of migration. Helps me make sure I have the old and the new mapped out, and also helps to have a checklist to go through systematically. I also tend to group related pages in batches, as presumably related pages will be linked to each other, and once Google comes crawling back over one page it will see the new URLs and crawl those too, faster than it would crawl unrelated pages. Finally, use a HTTP header check tool (google that and you'll find several) after you add the redirects just to make 100% certain you've set everything up correctly. And where possible, mass-redirect in a single .htaccess rule rather than one by one.