I fcked it up, maybe (need help).

[kriespy10]

Hi, I started my first website blog in a fitness/health niche about 3 months ago, reason is long term I would definitely stick to this because of personal interest. But I might have fcked myself here.

Situation: When posting a new post on my blog I didn't optimize my URL slug very well, in fact I just let the H1 title be my slug. I found that most higher ranking sites have a customized slug, therefore I started changing these slugs.
However I think this is where my site went the wrong direction. I kept having the same results and everyday I lost indexed links, for some reason they were crawled by google but google did not index them.

Next step: I need advice for my next step. I am thinking about delete the search console account and link a new one to my blog. I don't know if this will solve the problem or fck me up even more.

Note: If you know what the problem exactly is please leave a reply on how I can fix it. (On bingwebmaster which I started later everything is fine, I keep getting more links indexed).

Thanks for reading.

 

[Deleted member 832639]

Install Yoast Seo plugin if you use wordpress, this plugin do 301 redirect if you change slug.
Now you can add redirects manually in htaccess, then the links will not go away.
In general, I recently had a case, I changed the slug of an article which was 2 years old and everything went well - after 2 months it almost restored all positions back.

 

[HenryObi]

Next step: I need advice for my next step. I am thinking about delete the search console account and link a new one to my blog. I don't know if this will solve the problem or fck me up even more.

Deleting search console won't fix the problem on your site.

I think you need to go back and redirect every single post URL that was changed. Redirect the olds to the new ones. You should be fine after this.

 

[kriespy10]

Install Yoast Seo plugin if you use wordpress, this plugin do 301 redirect if you change slug.
Now you can add redirects manually in htaccess, then the links will not go away.
In general, I recently had a case, I changed the slug of an article which was 2 years old and everything went well - after 2 months it almost restored all positions back.

I have RankMath does this plugin also work?

 

[praetserge]

Did you implement 301 redirects from old urls to new ones?

 

[roydan]

As others said here, 301 is the way to go here. This is how you tell Google that a page's URL was permanently changed. The sooner you do it, the better. After doing so, inspect the URL and request indexing, or validate the fix in search console.

 

[ErrlyBird]

If you don't remember your old links, you can leave it alone and it'll just take time to start getting your ranking back.

 

[KHer0]

It's totally fine to have your h1 title as your slug. You shouldn't have changed it as long as you started SEO campaign. I would set it back if I were you and don't build exact match backlinks.

 

[VladuslavUkra]

Can you write to me in DM? Or by mail, I'll try to help solve your problem in an easy way

 

[Hawkeye Digital]

You changed the slug for urls , now you would have to optimize it again mate .

 

[khloros]

Never change url without 301 redirect

 

[sageshark]

Thanks for reading.

Since its been over 6 months, what is the situation now?
Did things change after you implement 301 redirect?

 

[kriespy10]

The situation right now: Yes I fixed the problem but as always it didn't take long before the next problem hit the surface. The Google Update in March (on the 15th I believe) hit my site. Lost everything down to 14 keywords estimating 50 traffic. Haven't bothered to revive the site, however it is doing an excellent job on Bing search.

As you can see I did manage to fix the original problem by simply updating my content and publishing a couple more articles. Nevertheless end results are still dissapointing.

 

[alexfsi]

Hi, I started my first website blog in a fitness/health niche about 3 months ago, reason is long term I would definitely stick to this because of personal interest. But I might have fcked myself here.

Situation: When posting a new post on my blog I didn't optimize my URL slug very well, in fact I just let the H1 title be my slug. I found that most higher ranking sites have a customized slug, therefore I started changing these slugs.
However I think this is where my site went the wrong direction. I kept having the same results and everyday I lost indexed links, for some reason they were crawled by google but google did not index them.

Next step: I need advice for my next step. I am thinking about delete the search console account and link a new one to my blog. I don't know if this will solve the problem or fck me up even more.

Note: If you know what the problem exactly is please leave a reply on how I can fix it. (On bingwebmaster which I started later everything is fine, I keep getting more links indexed).

Thanks for reading.

For redirecting, it is recommended to use either RankMath or Yoast.

 

[free_flower]

Never change url without 301 redirect

Redirect the old link to the new one immediately after changing the URL?