Frequent URL changes can negatively impact SEO

Ever thought about changing your page URLs to make them look cleaner or more SEO-friendly? Sounds like a good idea but only if you do it the right way. Redirects are super useful for preserving SEO when updating URLs, but if you start changing them too often, things can get messy.

Too many URL changes can confuse Google, break links, and even hurt your rankings. So, in this article, I’ll break down why redirects are beneficial, and why constantly tweaking your URLs could backfire on your SEO.

Understanding URL redirection

If changing URLs is risky, how do you handle situations where a URL change is necessary? That’s where proper redirection comes in.

What is url redirection ?

URL redirection is like when a website sends you to a different address without you having to do anything. Imagine you type in a URL, but instead of loading that exact page, it automatically takes you somewhere else. For example, if you go to "wikipedia.com," it’ll just send you straight to "wikipedia.org" without you even realizing it.

This happens because the website owner set up a redirection to make sure visitors end up where they’re supposed to, even if they type in the wrong domain or URL. It’s like if you wanted to make sure people can find your place, even if they use a different address.

Are redirects bad for seo ?

When you make changes to URLs—whether you're updating a page slug, moving content, or restructuring your site—proper redirects are your best friend. Without them, you risk losing traffic, confusing Google, and damaging your SEO efforts.

Let's go over why proper redirects are beneficial :

• Preserving SEO value (Link juice): When changing a URL, it’s important not to lose valuable backlinks. A 301 redirect ensures that the SEO value of these backlinks is passed to the new page, helping maintain your rankings and preserving the link equity.

• Improving user experience & reducing bounce rate: If users click on a link and land on a "404 Not Found" error page, it harms their experience and increases the bounce rate. A 301 redirect automatically sends them to the correct page, ensuring smooth navigation and maintaining your site’s credibility.

• Preventing duplicate content & improving crawl efficiency: Without redirects, Google may index both the old and new versions of a page, creating duplicate content issues.

  This could hurt your rankings. A 301 redirect helps Google understand the change, passes SEO authority to the new page, and optimizes crawl efficiency to better manage the site’s crawl budget.

Changing your URL slugs frequently can hurt your SEO

Now, while redirections are a great tool for preserving SEO, relying on them too much and frequently changing URLs can backfire. Too many redirects can slow down your site, confuse search engines, and negatively impact your rankings.

Here’s why excessive URL changes can hurt your SEO:

1. Crawl budget waste

Imagine Googlebot as an explorer with a flashlight navigating a massive maze. He has limited time to shine his light and analyze the paths ahead. If you add too many detours, locked doors (redirects), or constantly shifting passages (URL changes), he’ll waste valuable time finding the right way instead of focusing on the most important parts of your site.

Why too many redirects are a problem

Redirects are useful, but when you overdo it:

• Googlebot has to jump through hoops to get to the final page.

• If there’s a chain of redirects (one leading to another, and another…), it slows everything down.

• Worst case? Googlebot gives up before reaching the actual page.

Changing URLs too often? That’s a problem too

If you keep tweaking your URLs, Google has to rediscover and reindex them constantly, which:

• Wastes crawl budget on pages that shouldn’t even need crawling again.

• Can cause SEO issues if redirects aren’t set up properly.

• Delays the indexing of new pages because Googlebot is too busy dealing with the mess.

“ Avoid long chains of redirects, as they negatively impact crawling “ Google

Skroutz.gr case study :

Skroutz.gr, a search engine and marketplace in Greece, optimized its crawl budget to improve SEO. With over 3 million products, the site's navigation generated too many URLs, causing crawl and duplicate content issues.

Between February 2018 and June 2019, Skroutz.gr reduced its indexed URLs by 72% (from 25 to 7 million) while increasing monthly sessions to 30 million. This optimization fixed crawl issues, removed redundant pages, and improved the site structure to prioritize essential pages.

2. Redirect chains & loops

To avoid those broken links, you’d need to set up 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one. But if you change URLs too often, keeping up with all the redirects can get messy, and it can even slow down your website, which is bad for SEO and user experience.

A redirect chain happens when a URL is redirected multiple timesbefore reaching its final destination :

Each extra redirect adds a delay to your page load time, which can hurt your SEO performance. Plus, the link equity (or PageRank) gets diluted along the way.

A redirect loop is even worse—it happens when URLs keep redirecting to each other, creating an endless cycle. This can:

• Confuse search engines and break indexing, making it hard for them to index the page properly.

• Lead to a bad user experience (constant page reloads).

Google typically follows up to five redirects per session and can follow five more in a subsequent session. However, redirects exceeding 10 hops are a red flag, as they prevent Google from passing link signals effectively to the final destination.

 What to do:

• Avoid redirecting an already redirected URL.

• Use tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to detect and fix redirect chains.

You can also check for redirection issues in the Google Search Console, where you’ll find a report showing any redirects on your site.

3. It messes up your site structure

Changing slugs frequently disrupts the overall structure of your site. If your URLs are all over the place, it can confuse both Google and users. You want your site to be easy to navigate and understand, and constantly changing URLs makes that harder.

If you have a URL structure like:
/nyc/best-pizza-places
and then you change it to:
/top-pizza-joints-nyc

you’re not just changing the page’s URL, but also how it fits into the overall structure of the site.

This can create a kind of "mess" where the pages seem less connected, making it harder for Google to understand how they relate to each other.

4.Link equity loss & causing duplicate 

Every time you change a URL, any backlinks pointing to it lose their value unless properly redirected. If you have lots of redirects set up, search engines might not fully pass along the link equity from the old URL to the new one. Over time, this can really hurt your rankings.

in 2022, John Mueller from Google sort of confirmed that you can lose some link equity with 301 redirects. He basically mentioned that it's a good idea to update old links whenever possible to preserve as much link equity as you can:

Google advises that redirects shouldn’t be used for URLs that should actually return a 404. Redirects are great for preserving link equity, but they should only be used for one-to-one replacements, like during site redesigns or rebranding.

If the redirected page is different from the original, Google might treat it as a soft 404 and won’t pass any link equity:

Also, when the same content shows up on different web addresses, that's called duplicate content. There’s no direct penalty for it, but it can lead to drops in rankings and traffic sometimes.

Like Moz says, this happens because GoogleBot doesn’t know whether to pass the link metrics (like trust, authority, anchor text, link equity, etc.) to just one page or spread them across multiple versions. And on top of that, it doesn't know which version to rank for search results.

So, it's important to be careful with URL changes—only do them when absolutely necessary and make sure the redirects are properly set up to preserve your site's SEO value.

Final thoughts:

URL redirection is a crucial tool for preserving SEO, but it should be used wisely. While it helps maintain rankings, user experience, and link equity, relying too much on redirections due to frequent URL changes can cause ranking drops, broken links, lost backlinks, and site structure issues.

To avoid SEO damage, always plan URL changes carefully and implement redirections correctly.

If you're unsure about how to create SEO-friendly URL slugs, check out our article on what a URL slug is and how to make it SEO-friendly to learn more about best practices and avoid potential SEO issues.