Changed some urls and handles...now I'm worried about SEO?

Question

I recently made a Shopify ecommerce store website. I am new to creating websites, SEO, etc and so have a question. I used the Google Webmaster Tool and submitted by website and sitemap.

Then, a day or two later, after reading some SEO stuff online, I started playing around with the url and handle for some of the pages.

For example I changed (have a custom domain)

www.example.com/pages/technology-lessons

to

www.example.com/pages/classroomtechnology

I didn't realize doing this was such a big deal with 401 redirects etc for search engines. I just submitted my site to Google a few days ago so not sure how this would affect it. Is there something I need to do so my SERP isn't negatively affected? After I finish making all my url handle changes could I just submit a new sitemap to Google?

Just looking for a little more information...worried I may have created a mess by doing this.

Answer 1

Shopify automatically redirect collections page URLs that you change via the menu system. However make sure any other links you have created yourself on the website are not broken after you changed the URLs.



You can check if any links are broken on a webpage with a handy little free Google Chrome Extensions called "Check My Links", install it and run it on each page of your website, any broken links will turn up red, all unbroken links turn up green.



In regards to your XML sitemap, you don't need to update your sitemap as Shopify automatically update it each time you add, remove or change a page. However you can speed up the search engines indexing of your new pages by:



1) 301 redirecting old pages to new pages via the .htcaccess file. Unfortunately Shopify don't currently provide this option which leaves us with number two.



2) Ping your new pages via a free pinging service, without promoting any ping service as I can't objectively say any of them really work, but it's worth a try. Search for "ping website". Type in all your new webpage URLs and ping them to the search engines for quicker indexing.



The good thing is EVENTUALLY the old 404 pages will drop out of the search index and the new pages will replace them irrespective if you update your sitemap or not.



Patience is the aim of the game.

Answer 2

Get your site listed on directories, Google like that as it

builds backlinks. List for free on this one, it's mine and it's good, very good -

www.TheAZdirectory.com



See how it goes from there, use Google analytics to track your SEO

performance, Adwords for targeted traffic and AdSense for revenue.



Hope this helps....

Answer 3

As you have said that u have changed the pages. You need to fix that because if you don't do that the crawler couldn't find that and will report that and that pages shouldn't indexed.

Answer 4

Strictly speaking only massive sites with 1000s of pages must use site maps to maximize the number of their pages that get indexed, small time operators will probably get fully indexed just from spidering your menu system, though a site has to be initially brought to the search engines' attention, like you did.



One is expected to update site maps as the site chances, those rename pages will effectively be restarting their search ranking from scratch, if it's only been days it probably doesn't make much difference, better to learn about and implement meta data for each page now rather than later, meta keyword lists are ignored by Google, though the meta title and meta descriptions are 2 I would have in place, meta descriptions are commonly shown in the search result summary, providing your first promotional contact wit a prospect.