Changing URL Structure

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Sascha Pascal van Opzeeland: SEO Question:
  
  Hey guys, I'm new to this group so I guess I'll just kick off with a question:
  
  Our webmaster recently changed the URL structure of our blog posts. Old URLs had the date of the post in them, new ones do not have this date. However, we couldn't push the change through entirely because it would affect all the older posts as well, through which they'd lose their social shares.
  
  Now we have an in-between situation in which 1 blog post is accessible by 2 URLs (one with date, one without). However, only the old URLs are added to our index. What I wonder is whether we are at risk of being penalised by Google for duplicate content?
  
  Or is it not a problem since Google only takes into account the URLs that are added to the index?
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  Rob Maas: There is no duplicate penalty , use a canonical to concentrate values on one page
  
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  PromozSEO: As +Rob Maas ;said, use a canonical tag on each page and point out the version of URL you want Google to index. Additionally you can redirect old URLs to the respective new URLs permanently (301).
  
  Change the old URL versions to new URLs on your sitemap file/s and fetch the new URLs on Search Console.
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  Neeraj Pandey: Agree with +PromozSEO​. You have created new URLs means now you want to present your new URLs to the user so either use 301 redirect from old to new URLs or if you can't then use canonical. Now, google has been very smart to figure out which content is original and which to rank so even if you have duplicate content issue in your website don't worry google will still rank you but yes to only the page it thinks is to show to the users.
  But if you want to change your URLs in search result, you should use either redirect or canonical tag, update all new URLs in internal linking and xml file and use fetch as googlebot to your HTML sitemap to submit URLs into index.
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  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:05:25 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/changing_url_structure +Sascha Pascal van Opzeeland
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
  
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  Sascha Pascal van Opzeeland: Great, thanks a lot for your help! We'll go for the canonical.