Losing Social Media Count After Changing URL Structure - A Mystery! | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 1:20 pm – January 5, 2014 by Financial Samurai

Howdy Folks,

Hope everyone is having a good new year so far. One of the dilemmas I've struggled w/ is whether I should change my post URL structure to exclude the date. I like a shorter, simpler URL structure that will also stay if I so happen to change the date of the post if I add to it.

I decided to ask Andrea to make the change during the site redesign and cross my fingers nothing would break. Nothing has so far, but one of the downsides of changing is the absolute loss of your Social Media button counts e.g. likes, tweets, +s, etc. The good thing is that given the links are redirected, Google should continue to count these social media signals, however, the visibility of the count is gone.

What I've noticed after several days is this:

* The Google+ count started coming back.

* Then a little bit of the Tweets.

* Then I noticed this one post, "The 1/10th Rule Of Car Buying" started showing my entire social media count from before. Please take a look at the bottom where the Shareholics plugin is to see what I mean.

My question to any of you gurus out there is: What's going on? Are the Social Media plugins getting "smarter" by recovering the visible count? Does it just take time to recover fully? Or is the post above just a one off example?

Thanks,

Sam

The Passive Income Earner said:

I just implemented a redirectmatch in my .htaccess file to use the post name permalink rather than the month/year/post name and I also lost the social counts. The reason is that it uses your old post URL to track counts at Tweeter and Facebook.

I hope you implemented the redirectmatch 301 to ensure you did not lose any of your juice with the search engines.

I am fine with losing the counts, I believe it's just a cosmetic presentation on my site. I wanted to have a permalink page to avoid having the date in the post. That way, when I update a review annually, I can keep the same post originally post and not lose the traffic to it from search engine.

I changed for the same reason. I forgot I posted this forum post until you replied. Losing the cosmetics is too bad, but it motivates me to write new articles to see what becomes. The redirectmatch 301 was implemented. Search traffic is doing well YTD. thx