[Scoundreller]

> More often than not, there'll be a mistake, you send the wrong signal to Google, and you take a hit.

There's probably a publication bias here. When people change things and traffic goes up, they don't run to tell the world about it.

Though anecdotally, I have a lot of reference-type content that has been bubbling up over the years seemingly solely because it hasn't changed at all in 7 years. The big players like to refresh their design and layout every few years.

[ericclemmons]

You're absolutely right!

In my experience, we've had more bad than good with URL changes.

The interesting part is that often a "URL cleanup" would result in a quick "boost" in traffic/rankings, but would continually slump, often even unrecoverable after reverting.