Silo Fix, Effects to be seen?

animalstyle

BuSo Pro
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Mar 28, 2015
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My authority site had some siloing issues based on how I set wordpress up. A few of the silos of my site were split like this:

site.com/widget-section/ (main widget listing)
site.com/widget-section/sub-section/ (sub widget listing)
and
site.com/widgets/item1/ (item listing)
site.com/widgets/item2/ (item listing)
...

Essentially the entire section was about the same thing, but the content and the items were in two different url silos. What I did was brought them together with a structure like this:

site.com/widgets/ (main widget listing)
site.com/widgets/sub-section/ (sub widget listing)
site.com/widgets/item1/ (item listing)
site.com/widgets/item2/ (item listing)

Essentially bringing everything under site.com/widgets/

The site content and interlinking remains the same. All old URLS are 301ed correctly to their new locations and I went through the entire site and pointed all the old links over to the new locations.

Has anyone had any experience doing something like this?
Would you guess I am in for better rankings in the long term?
If so, should I predict a short term drop while everything is re-indexed?
 
From my experience, you might see a slight drop and bounce back to where you at or you might not even move. I can tell you, from my experience, this will not help much without adding fresh/re-fresh content + inter-linking + inbound links + some social signals... Of course it will help in the long term. Just don't let the site set stagnant waiting for a miracle here. Just curious, what did you use to redirect old URLs (redirect plugin) or something else?
 
@The Kloser

Thank you, very helpful. This is a very active project so I wasn't looking for an SEO miracle just from taking this action. It was some long overdue house cleaning that needed to be done anyways.

For redirects I handle them manually in my .htaccess file.
 
Excellent! just a quick add reading your post, your traffic should not drop since you have all URLs 301ed proper but you know that already :wink:
 
I can't see how to 301 in yoast - did they remove that feature?
 
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