An Awesome Video from Google about URL Structure
Below is a simple video from Google explaining what happens when you change your URLs and what steps to take to make sure Google can index your website. If you need any professional help with your website development, please feel free to contact Whitefish Marketing on 01303 720 288. We offer a free and no-obligation consultation discovery call to see how we can help or redesign your website. Now… onwards with the video!!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHjVmi1tkEw
Video Transcript:
“Today, a question from YouTube is about tweaking a website’s URL structure. Unfortunately, while this may at first sound like a small change within a website, it’s not that simple for search engines. In particular, search engines like Google store their index on a per page basis. So if you change the address or the URL of a page, that page’s data has to be forwarded somehow, otherwise it gets lost. It doesn’t matter if you’re completely rebuilding a website or if you’re just removing a slash from the end of URLs, these are all essentially site moves. We have extensive documentation that I’ll link to in the description. In particular, we recommend first research the options and the potential effects. Since these changes take time and have ranking effects, it’s also recommended to consider the timing of when you make the move. Second, create a list of the old and the new URLs.
This will help you to track and check the changes afterwards. Then start the migration. 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new ones. Also update all internal mentions, such as links, forms, structured data, site maps and the robots.txt file. Finally, monitor their migration. Check all pages for the redirect. In Google Search Console’s report, you should see a quick change for the most important pages and then a slower change as our systems reprocess the rest. Overall, this can take several months to complete. Redirects should remain in place for at least one year.
Whew, that’s a lot, right? Well, these changes are not always easy. However, with good research, documentation and preparation, I’m confident that you can make them work. Good luck and see you next time.”
