Google has released a video where John Mueller describes the SEO impact of the changes that you make to the URL structure of your website.
In the video, Mueller of Google said that if you create changes in the structure of your web pages, then it\’ll take a while for search engines to fully process it. It typically takes about a month for this to take place.
John Mueller summarized the key points of a detailed documentation on site moves (which you can find here), and here are the key points:
- Do the research before doing the migration
- Time the update when it is a good time to have a dip in traffic
- Create a list of the old and new URLs for mapping purposes
- Implement the migration with 301 redirects and internal site updates, like navigation, XML sitemaps, etc
- Monitor the migration with analytics and Search Console
