Should I change or redirect this URL?

[Haytem]

Happy Friday everyone!

I just noticed that one of our Attorney Profile's url's is wrong. We used to have someone named "Dana Fortugno" as our Family Law attorney, but when he left, (over two years ago) we hired "Scott Finelli." The person who setup the site, just changed the information on the page not url. So instead of it saying "http://www.kempruge.com/scott-finelli-jd-llm/;" it says "http://www.kempruge.com/dana-fortugno-jd-llm/."

I'm considering taking all the content on the page with the wrong url, copying it to a new page with the correct URL and 301 redirecting (what would now be a blank page) to the new page with the correct URL.

Is this the best way to handle this?

Also, I don't believe there are many SEO concerns regarding the pages specifically. The profile pages aren't what we rank for in any of our Family Law related keywords. I am worried about having a completely blank page that just 301 redirects as looking bad to google, but not sure if it would?

As always, thank you for your time and any assistance you can provide.

[TrinhAnhhn1012]

uppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp lên nào

[DanielGarneau]

Hello Haytem,

I had a similar concern to yours when I wanted to rename some of my html pages to give them a more meaningful url name readable by humans and by machines. One of my concern was that people who had identified my old page as a "favoite" would have an easy mechanism to find their way back to my site.

What I did was copy my original html page, giving it the new name I wanted for it. Then I made sure all of my site's links to the old page pointed to the new page. So for a few days I had the very same content in both old and new pages. When all testing was finished, I replaced the content of the old page by a generic text explaining that this page was now available in the new location, and I also provided a link on that old page (which became my home made reroute page) to the new html page.

I then made the necessary adjustments in my "sitemap.xml" and "robots.txt" files so that robots would ignore the old files ("sitemap.xml") and so that it would stop being shown in search engines that had previously listed it in their memories ("robots.txt").

[DanielGarneau]

Well I agree in theory with not changing the URLs. However in practice I have now converted my former css-html based web site over to a WordPress CMS site.

I wanted to do this in order to gain flexibility in the future evolution of my site. The URL names of my web pages has completely been changed. Now all of my pages bear names that are meaningful within their own language, (instead of nomfrançais_en.html, nomfrançais_es.html, for example).

Now if anyone types one of my old file names in their browser, they end-up to the new page through a one-on-one set of commands that rerout them from a .htaccess file.