Restructuring website and 301s?

Stormrulz72

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So I'm thinking of restructuring my website into a silo from the current

http://www.site.com/post

into

http://site.com/category/post

I was just wondering if anyone knows what sorts of affects it could have on serps, or what the proper way of doing it on Wordpress would be. I've done some significant link building on posts, but have realised now that it needs to be silo'd for easier navigation (due to the niche I'm in)

I only have about 40 posts at the moment, but looking at increasing it ten fold over the next few weeks

I read that maybe using 301s could keep some of the link juice?

Any help is appreciated :)
 
I can actually tell you a bit about this as I've done it to an established website (it had 500 posts and about 800 visitors a day).

I posted about how I handled the change here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-changing-url-effects-my-ranking.855523/#post-9039646
Back when I was restructuring the URL structure of my business site, I changed the URL for my posts from site.com/post-name to site.com/blog/post-name. Here's what I did to make sure the transition went as smoothly as possible:
  1. I went into Google Analytics and took note of my most popular articles.
  2. I changed the post URL structure in Wordpress to the aforementioned blog/post-name.
  3. I 301 redirected the old URLs for the most popular article to the new ones first and the rest second.
  4. I manually double-checked that the links were working.
My rankings for almost all of my posts were exactly the same after that, although there was a bit of a mishap where I messed up on a couple of URLs, and my rankings on those articles dropped briefly until I 301 redirected them properly. However, 1 article never entirely recovered its rankings (previously position 2, but it's been at position 9 since the incident)

Just make sure you 301 redirect the URLs and you should be fine.

To add a bit more to that, prioritise your most popular articles based on backlinks and views.

Really, as long as you don't forget to 301 redirect any URLs, you won't see a negative impact to your website's rankings.
 
Brilliant! That's what I needed before going ahead with it haha

Thanks - I really appreciate it :)
 
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