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I have a blog posts that almost have no traffic. To improve them I am thinking about changing the title (h1), the title of the page and the meta description.

To match with the title, It would be good to change the url too. I can make a redirection with a 301 in the .htaccess.

Is it a good practice to change the url of a blog post? Does it have any drawbacks from a SEO point of view?

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  • I have no clue what you're talking about.
    – Rob
    Aug 22, 2016 at 14:04
  • @Rob I tried to explain it in a different way. Tell me if there is anything you do not understand.
    – Nrc
    Aug 22, 2016 at 14:29

2 Answers 2

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While it is better not to have a 301 redirect, there generally is no harm in search performance to update a URL using a 301 redirect. This method has the advantage of preserving any value or most of the value from any inbound (back) link to your page.

Keep in mind that a redirect results in multiple requests. While the effect of this is small, as a practice, it is better not to use a 301 redirect if at all possible.

For this reason, evaluate any inbound (back) links to your page. If there are valuable links, then you do want to do a 301 redirect to change the old URL to a new URL to preserve link value. However, if you find little to no value, then it is likely better to update the URL to the original post and drop the old URL resulting in a 404 Not Found. In this case, search engines will find the new URL just fine and rank it appropriately over a small amount of time and drop the old URL from the index entirely. Again, only do this if the post has link of little to no value.

One small warning. Most people want to preserve any link value at all cost regardless. Most of the time, unless there is a moderate to fairly significant value to the link, it is just not worth the effort. You have to decide. Do not be nervous to break a link. Links come and go. Make sure that if you chose to preserve any link value that the value you are preserving is worth the effort. Why do I say this? Again, it is because often people try and preserve link value that is often disposable. Of course, you are the only one who can decide this. Whether you preserve link value using a 301 redirect or not is your choice. There is no real harm either way.

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  • Perhaps a solution would be to make to make a 301 redirection for a month or two and then delete that redirection. What do you think about that?
    – Nrc
    Aug 23, 2016 at 8:17
  • @Nrc It is up to you. I had 287,000 pages that I changed the URLs to and I did 301 redirect them all for 6 months which was far too long. ;-) My scenario was a bit different, but not too different. Plus, I did not really care too much about my site at that time - still don't. Redoing it. 301 redirects are fine. In my case, I did a 301 because I had a lot of links, but not high value links so I did not mind letting them go after a while. Yeah. A 301 for a while is fine. The longer it exists, the longer your old URL hangs around so do not make it too long. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Aug 23, 2016 at 14:51
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To improve your website visitor and rank you can change title (h1), the title of the page and the meta description. But followed by canonical rules.

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  • I do not understand your answer. When you say "followed by canonical rules" you mean that there should be one one page with the same content? But It is clear that it will be only one page. The question is if it is better to keep the old url that does not match the h1 or change the url.
    – Nrc
    Aug 23, 2016 at 8:33
  • when you change title for blog then also change your url. More time changing title url will be change more time. After then previous url get 404 error but your content will be all ready index by search engine with previous url. So you need to proper 301 redirection. Aug 23, 2016 at 15:08
  • I meant you'll need to follow canonical rules while doing this. Aug 24, 2016 at 5:16

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