An interesting question came up during the Google webmaster hangout on YouTube Live this past Friday. One webmaster was planning to migrate to HTTPs and thought, since they are doing the migration, it would also be a good time to switch from numeric URLs to a more keyword rich based URL structure.

But John Mueller said no, it isn’t necessarily a good time to do that. The answer is kind of obvious. When you migrate from HTTP to HTTPS or even from one domain to another. Google is able to understand the protocol change, assuming nothing else is changed. So the whole URL structure remains the same, with the exception of the beginning of the URLs. That makes it easier and faster for Google to pick up on the change.

But if you change all your URLs, that can take quiet a bit longer for Google to pick up.

The question started at the 40:20 mark:

John Mueller responded:

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube Live.