Nice! Thanks for sharing 🙂

You’re welcome, Partha! Really glad my pointers were helpful—I hope you see a traffic rebound soon (focus on the on-page stuff & make sure your content reads like it’s by and for real humans) 🙂

Hey Ryan,

Thanks very much for the reply.

This all makes perfect sense, and is exactly how was I looking to move forward.

Appreciate the confirmation.

Partha

Hey Partha! GREAT questions. The short answer I’d give you is… don’t overcorrect! I think it’s quite possible to read into short-term Google algorithm fluctuations a bit too much, when your rankings/traffic might actually settle out over the longer-term.

If you take a look at how my permalinks are structured here on my blog, you’ll see I go pretty directly at the main target keyword phrase for a particular article. That’s intentional, because it sends a clear signal to search engines as to the topic of my content here—and I strongly believe that’s a good best practice to follow. So I wouldn’t recommend changing all of your permalinks on your blog (and thus create a bunch of redirects). That being said, while I do recommend a permalink (and H1) to include your target keyword phrase, it’s very smart to make sure your article/page as a whole does a more comprehensive job of naturally talking about the subject at-hand, rather than keyword stuffing into every header along through your blog post. That’s the place to make sure you’re being much more natural in language/structure.

As always, an enjoyable read.

Firstly, sorry for the being a bit late to the party, but this is a subject that I wished to learn more today.

I have a niche website that was doing really well until I got hit by a couple of the Google Updates of 2022 (HCU & Spam).

It occurred to me that much of content was far too keyword focused, hence the potential spam penalties.

One of things that I had done with this site was to have the permalink as the exact keyword, including any stop words.

This also happened to be exact title, as well as my first H2 tag after my introduction (it’s probably easy to see why I received a Google “slap” now, LOL).

I’m in the process of rewriting most articles on the site (all 571 one of them, phew!), but wanted to know what you thought about potentially changing ALL the permalinks to be a little “less spammy”?

I’m aware of 301 redirects, etc. but just wanted your opinion.

Is changing my content to be more “helpful” and less “spammy” enough, or should I also alter my permalinks too?

Thanks very much Ryan, I’ve learned a lot from you over the years.

Look forward to your response.

Partha

Yep! Your permalink is the same thing as a URL 🙂

I’ve seen the parent-child permalink structure work very well for certain use cases, but for my blog I haven’t yet had the *need* to implement it… now, if I were to do a series of posts that are all related to an overarching theme / topic… like let’s say a dozen or two comparison articles between service providers in an industry, then it could make a lot of sense to have a structure like… “mysite(.)com/comparison/tool-abc-tool-xyz” or something along those lines.