Category Link Rewrite for better SEO

[vineshkumar]

Hi,

 

For our website, we have created landing page module with seo friendly urls. What we have found is this pages are indexed fast and already ranking well as compared to our category pages on which we put in a lot of SEO effort. Somewhere we felt it is the SEO friendly URL format that is affecting the ranking of these category pages.

 

Our Landing Page url format - www.sitename.com/c/landing-page

 

Categroy Page url format - www.sitename.com/31-category-name

 

After comparing the url structure of our competitors, we felt the need to remove the category id or change the format.

 

So we plan to execute the below - www.sitename.com/category/31/category-name

 

Somewhere we feel that 31-category-name is considered incorrectly, affecting the SEO. Though friendly URL is just a part of many things to get URL ranked, but as compared to our landing page success, we want to give a try.

 

I am bit confused whether to go for 301 redirect or canonical URL. Also want to know how to begin with. We have around 100 categories and so do not want to take risk with ranking of the pages.

 

Thanks & Regards,

Vineshkumar K

[FME_Modules]

Doesnt matter which you choose but yes the preferable is to use 301 permanant redirection only if you are going to make the earlier URL dead because it canonical will not redirect the user to the new page but only its for search engines and it will users a 404 page if they are comming from a refferal link that you have created earlier.

Edited September 9, 2013 by alastairbrian (see edit history)