Google: Don't Change Your URLs For SEO Purposes

Dec 30, 2013 - 8:10 am 14 by

Google Balls logoGoogle's John Mueller responded to a question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about changing a site's URL structure completely.

The site has tons and tons of dynamic URLs that look like this:

  • /search?manufacturer=fairline
  • ?keywords=Fairline+Targa+38
  • ?dealer=4589-adex-yachting

You get the idea. The site owner wants to change them to /boats-for-sale/fairline for example.

Now, for the most part, I am always wary about changing a URL that ranks already. John from Google said:

I'd recommend *not* changing them, if you'd just change them for SEO reasons.

But in this case, /search? might make sense, and I may argue with John. But I don't have the analytics or data to make a full decision on this, but typically /search URLs might signal the wrong message to Google. Even though Google wants you to feed them dynamic URLs as dynamic URLs and not as static URLs. But in this case, a search URL is something Google likely wouldn't want to index.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 1, 2025

Jul 1, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google June 2025 Core Update Is Rolling Out - What We're Seeing So Far

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Search Console Insights Report

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:41 am
Spiders

Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Who Ate The Bing Search Results

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google AdSense

Google AdSense New Privacy Law & Opt-Out Mechanism

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google Engineers Take Offense To Dilbert On Arrogance