We have an ecom store with a few thousand products. We are planning changing the URL structure which would require quite a few redirects.
Assuming I am hitting all URLs with my redirects, would it or could it still happen that we will experience ranking drops?
From my experience, when I made website relaunches on some B2B clients, even though we redirected everything, they experienced quite often an decrease in traffic.
What is your experience with this? Our website is ranking fairly well and I don't want to risk anything actullay.
We are planning changing the URL structure which would require quite a few redirects
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Ammon
The URL is the 'unique identifier' that this particular kind of database uses. All other signal and ranking information gets assigned to the URL. If you change the URL you literally create a whole new database entry, in this case, in the search index.
Changing the URL means it is not the same listing in the index. No matter what other signals change or don't, it is a NEW entry. It will take time to process all of those backlinks of backlinks or backlinks for the new PageRank values to work out, and for the anchor text and near-anchor text signals to be applied, etc. etc.
Google have flip-flopped at times about whether a redirect passes *all* of the original PageRank, or whether there is any kind of damping factor applied. This gets confused and obfuscated further because sometimes Google talk about the 'passable PageRank' or the passable value, where that 'passable' part means the damping factor is already applied as the unpassable portion.
Changing the URL means it is not the same listing in the index. No matter what other signals change or don't, it is a NEW entry. It will take time to process all of those backlinks of backlinks or backlinks for the new PageRank values to work out, and for the anchor text and near-anchor text signals to be applied, etc. etc.
Google have flip-flopped at times about whether a redirect passes *all* of the original PageRank, or whether there is any kind of damping factor applied. This gets confused and obfuscated further because sometimes Google talk about the 'passable PageRank' or the passable value, where that 'passable' part means the damping factor is already applied as the unpassable portion.