When a business owner decides it’s time update their website they must always consider the Search Engine implications of the proposed change.
Changing a page’s URL is the same as deleting the old page (and probably well indexed page) and replacing it with an entirely new page that starts with zero ranking.
So what constitutes a URL change?
Just about everything…
- URL’s are case sensitive, so even capitalising a page’s URL will effect the ranking for that page.
- Adding or removing dashes, or replacing underscores.
- Changing the extension (for example from .asp to .php or .html etc) will effect the ranking for the page.
- In short, a new URL that is not identical to the old, is considered a new URL.
Website developers must maintain the same URL structure and naming system, or use 301 redirects to advise Search Engines that the old & new pages are the same.
If it’s necessary to change URL’s apply the 301 redirects to .htaccess, then submit the old XML sitemap to Google Webmasters as well as the new XML sitemap (ie. use both sitemaps at the same time). That will ensure that Google continues to spider and index the old pages, and while doing so find the 301 redirects to the new pages.
The added benefit to doing this is that Google Webmasters wil alert you to pages that don’t have 301 redirects (ie. it will report 404 errors)
