This post has helped me immensely. Thank you! Question: when I created my niche subject Substack, I manually imported an archive of posts I'd done on another platform but I'd never used SEO before and didn't know to change my URLs. My archive of posts hasn't been looked at much, if at all, so would it be all right to change the URLs for better search potential now? I see you don't recommend this, so I would love to know what circumstances warrant doing so (and if mine fit those circumstances)?
There are several considerations, but the two big questions are how much traffic are you currently getting to those URLs and how extensively are you and others linking to them ?
When you migrated those links to Substack, you effectively started over with your SEO. And when you change the links on Substack, you’re doing the same thing.
If you don’t have many people viewing those pages, you’d be fine migrating them. The traffic loss would be minimal and you may not have many links to change internally. If you had lots of traffic to those pages and many sites linking to them, then I would caution against it. Or at least be prepared to lose a larger chunk of your Google referral traffic at least in the short term.
So far I've not had much traffic at all - what links have been shared are about 95% internal, and none of my archive of posts have shown up on Google anyway (the only one that has is my most recent post, which I posted following your advice for SEO)! So it looks like now is the perfect time for me to maximize my SEO potential. Thank you for your help today, and for your excellent advice!
Thanks, Kristi that is the part I was missing having just reached 100 subscribers.
Congrats on the milestone!
You’re amazing for doing this Kristi. Saving this post so that I can keep coming back to it.
Thank you, Linn. I'm excited to share this stuff!
Thanks Kristi, this is very helpful :)
This post has helped me immensely. Thank you! Question: when I created my niche subject Substack, I manually imported an archive of posts I'd done on another platform but I'd never used SEO before and didn't know to change my URLs. My archive of posts hasn't been looked at much, if at all, so would it be all right to change the URLs for better search potential now? I see you don't recommend this, so I would love to know what circumstances warrant doing so (and if mine fit those circumstances)?
Hi Patricia!
So glad you found this helpful!
There are several considerations, but the two big questions are how much traffic are you currently getting to those URLs and how extensively are you and others linking to them ?
When you migrated those links to Substack, you effectively started over with your SEO. And when you change the links on Substack, you’re doing the same thing.
If you don’t have many people viewing those pages, you’d be fine migrating them. The traffic loss would be minimal and you may not have many links to change internally. If you had lots of traffic to those pages and many sites linking to them, then I would caution against it. Or at least be prepared to lose a larger chunk of your Google referral traffic at least in the short term.
Best,
Kristi
So far I've not had much traffic at all - what links have been shared are about 95% internal, and none of my archive of posts have shown up on Google anyway (the only one that has is my most recent post, which I posted following your advice for SEO)! So it looks like now is the perfect time for me to maximize my SEO potential. Thank you for your help today, and for your excellent advice!
Sounds like it’s a good time! You’re welcome!