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Our company has URLs that are well ranked which is vital for us. But we need to change all the structure of thousands of URLs and I am afraid of a negative impact on our natural indexing and ranking on Google and others search engines.

Examples:

  • example.com/us/Fine-Art/features/the-olive-trees-van-gogh/
    Will become:
    example.com/us/Fine-Art/van-gogh/the-olive-trees/
  • example.com/de/Fine-Art/zeigt/the-olive-trees-van-gogh/
    Will become:
    example.com/de/Bildende-Kunst/van-gogh/the-olive-trees-van-gogh

All the 301 redirections will be performed by a PHP script which will analyse the URL and make a redirection to the new URL if needed.

If the PHP script works well and all the old URLs are well 301 redirected, and that therefore we have NO 404 linked to this URL restructuring, is there a risk of losing in indexing and ranking?

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If all redirection are performed at the right time (when url changed applied) their won't be problem. To ensure everything is ok i'll add two best practices :

  • Create a sitemap.html (yes html, not xml) with links inside to all the new url and also to all the old url. It will ensure that google will crawl all the redirection and discover all the new urls as soon as possible.
  • Have a sitemp.xml will all old urls, and one with all new url and add them in the search console to monitor the understanding by google of the migration.

301 redirection will keep seo, the first tips i gave will ensure it won't be a low period before google take them in account.

(NB: we created a tool wich help the redirection process using the content of each page, but contact me in private, i won't make sponsored content here)

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  • "help the redirection process using the content of each page" - what does this tool do? (That the old-to-new 301 redirects wouldn't?)
    – MrWhite
    Apr 28, 2022 at 12:47
  • Identifying which old page correspond to which new is not often easy, and sometimes couldn't be done by script in database. For this case we use an algorithm which compare all old content to all new content and suggest automatically for all old url their new path.
    – Patrick Valibus
    Apr 28, 2022 at 14:11
  • We developed a PHP platform which creates automatically URLs according to author name and the name of the artwork. It can be compared to Fineartamerica, IE fineartamerica.com/featured/… So it's all automatic but it must be without any bugs
    – London Smith
    Apr 28, 2022 at 14:26

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