(Entry was posted by David Hamilto on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/28/2020).

Should I rename the URLs or create new posts?

Hi gang - so here`s my situation...I`ve got a 4 year old site and I`ve done pretty much zero SEO work on it. Traffic has all come from PPC as that`s my main traffic gen skillset. Doing a quick quick, I barely get any traffic from any keywords of relevance. I also don`t have any inbound links of real relevance. Question is: can I rename the URLs to be more SEO friendly or do I still need to create brand new posts? I see warning about renaming links at all, but wonder if that really applies in a situation like my to Google.

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YOUR ANSWERS

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

Victoria Gitelshtein: I guess you should start from keywords optimizing, and then brand new content, inner linking, outer backlinks.
David Hamilton: Got it, that`s the plan. But if I rename the URLs of current posts, will it harm anything in Google, given I don`t have anything coming in via keywords for pretty much all of my URLs currently, as is?
Michael Martinez: Changing the URLs won`t help with SEO.
David Hamilton: I understand that alone won`t help with on-page SEO (or it plays a very, very small factor). My question distilled down is ...if I do change them will it harm anything in Google`s eyes, I`m guessing it won`t matter much.
Michael Martinez: David Hamilton If your site doesn`t automatically redirect the old URLs to the new URLs, just make sure you add redirects to the site.

You should be fine. I`ve changed thousands of URLs over the years and have never encountered a problem, except where I forget to redirect the URLs. That can be frustrating, especially when you`ve spent years advising people to redirect the URLs ...

So don`t forget - make sure the URLs are redirected.
David Hamilton: Michael Martinez Awesome thanks man!