SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

Google’s Sandbox for Major Site URL Changes

Changing a website’s entire URL structure can be both a blessing and a curse, if done incorrectly you can permanently damage a proportion of your overall SEO.

You may change the URL structure of your website to improve aspects such as on-site SEO and/or site usability such as product filtering.  This can change nearly all of the addresses (URL’s) that are used to view each section of the website which can cause multiple issues as shown below:

- Google and other search engines remember your old links. Search engines don’t waste time crawling your entire site every day or so they remember the significant pages within their index. If you made a site-wide change to the URL structure of your site then the search engines will be following many broken links on your site.  In less than a day Google could lose 90% of your content and they will hold your site back (sandbox it) if nothing is done with these broken links in about 3-5 days.

- People bookmark sections of your website. Someone may have a favorite part of your website to visit, perhaps the blog or a certain category. If you change the site’s structure and move content to other folders or addresses then that person’s bookmark becomes useless and they may get frustrated that they can’t find the information they were looking for again.

- Links from other websites have great SEO benefits. Google’s main ranking factor is the number of in-bound links from other sites to yours.  These links are scored more highly if they link deep within a site and are surrounded by content related to the site’s page that they’re linking to.  Changing your site’s URLs would make these internal links now broken links, the top level domain links won’t be effected (e.g. a link to http://www.example.com) but inner page links would (e.g. a link to http://www.example.com/category.html).  The link would still pass on link power to your site but it wouldn’t be as powerful as before, plus people who click on the link will not find the page they were looking for.

So how do you make sure these problems are resolved?

Google can ‘sandbox’ a website for up to around 3 months whilst it slowly crawls and re-instates it’s index with the website’s new URL layout.  Below are tips to make this transition as painless as possible and to ensure that you do every possible thing to get the new URL structure indexed and keep high rankings with existing SEO efforts:

- Use 301 Redirects for every page of content that has moved. A 301 server redirect tells the user or search engine spider that the page on this address has been moved permanently.  Google takes upto 2 weeks to finally get the message but it’s what they directly recommend webmasters to use.  301 redirects also pass on page rank to the new page which means that they are not only useful for users and search engines they also keep your SEO in-tact!  The 301 redirects can be created through the “.htaccess” file and can redirect whole folders as well as individual pages.

- Create a useful 404 page. Any broken links to your site should bring up your 404 error page.  Somebody may link to your site and accidentally type in the wrong address or you may miss out a 301 redirect so a 404 page will capture any people lost on your site.  The 404 page should contain a list of the most commonly visited sections of your website, you can also include the navigation bars, footer and header if you want it to look neat.  If your server doesn’t automatically goto “/404″ or “/404.html” then you may have to set the 404 page location in the “.htaccess” file.

- Update your XML sitemap. An XML sitemap contains all of the different URL’s from your entire website and it should be linked to within the “robots.txt” file.  This is the first port of call for any search engine spider so make sure it has your new URL structure within it.  You can submit your XML site map to many search engines, most noticeably in Google’s webmaster tools; make sure to re-submit the new structure to all the major search engines as they may not look at it for many days.

- Link to the new sections of your website. There’s nothing better than telling search engines to take a look at something than making fresh links.  If Google finds 3 or more external links to a new section of a website then it seems to crawl it faster than if you just had internal links to that section, another trick to get the new section indexed quicker is to create powerful links to the XML sitemap itself so it finds every link going.

- Remove Canonical Links. If you have an ecommerce site that uses session ID’s or filterable navigation (using Magento) then use the canonical meta tag to ensure the best version of each product page is indexed.  You could lose potential sales if Google re-indexed one your product pages with say a navigation setting set to “pink products only” for example.  Affiliate session ID’s can also appear in Google’s index instead of the main URL; if you run affiliate marketing then someone could be making masses of profit by having their tracking code at #1 in Google just for when people type your brand name into the search bar!

Checking things are all in place…

After all these techniques have been implemented you should check every single URL in Google to see that it redirects to the appropriate page on the new site.  Use the search term “site:example.com” into Google to see all of the pages that have been indexed on your site; if any bring up 404 errors, blank pages or server error messages then add them to the “.htaccess” file a.s.a.p.

Also check Google’s webmaster tools for any errors and see if your XML sitemap is submitted and upto date.

Good luck for implementing a site-wide change, if done with a logical structure of categories then you could see much improved ranking in Google and even perhaps a larger number of indexed pages.

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