: Changing URL format afftects SEO reputation and not considering 301 redirection We had URL http://www.example.com/category/subcategory.html which changed to http://www.example.com/category/filter/cat/subcategory.html

@Angela700

Google takes several things in account to determine how relevant a page is. The most important factors are:


Page content
Domain name
URL name


Let's assume that your content and your domain name didn't change. Even your HTML markup is still the same.

OLD example.com/category/subcategory.html
NEW example.com/category/filter/cat/subcategory.html


By changing your URLs you moved a potential keyword e.g. subcategory closer to the end of the URL.

Often example (which can be replaced by your online shop e.g. shoeworld) and a subcategory (e.g. flipflops) are concatenated by the user like shoeworld flipflops. The old URL will have a higher rank than the new one because of the better keyword position.

I only described the effect of changing the URL but please keep in mind that no one really knows how Google calculates it's metrics and thus we can only guess why thins happen in a certain manner.

In this case you did a proper 301 redirect as suggested by Google but the effect was not a big as you thought. Occasionally Google does not flush it's caches as soon you change something on your site. The Google Webmaster Tools provide you the option to delete deprecated content from their index. Please have a look at the corresponding help article. It might happen that you did not wait long enough or that the server does not send the right HTTP status code.

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