Website Redesign & Ensuring Minimal Traffic/Rankings Lost
-
Hi there,
We have undergone a website redesign (mycompany.com) and our site is ready to go live however the new website is built on a different platform so all of our blog pages will not be copied over - to avoid a large web developer expense.
So our intention is to then leave all the blog pages as (on the old web design) but move it to the domain blog.mycompany.com with 301 redirects inserted on mycompany.com for each blog post pointing to the corresponding blog.mycompany.com. Is there anything else we should do to ensure minimal traffic/rankings are lost?
Thank you so much for your help.
-
Having performed maybe upwards of 80 & without any real traffic loss for more than a week. It is because I follow the rules very thoroughly when you get to the bottom of this how do you please use one of the crawlers mentioned
use a complete search and replace when necessary across the entire site just to make sure everything’s in place.
I don’t know what type of website you’re running however if it is WordPress or if you I want toget some extra traffic I would make sure that the blog is a sub folder. if it is WordPress you can do this on a managed managed host platform like Pagely , ServeBolt or Kinsta for just $50 a month.
Redirect mapping process
If you are lucky enough to work on a migration that doesn’t involve URL changes, you could skip this section. Otherwise, read on to find out why any legacy pages that won’t be available on the same URL after the migration should be redirected.
The redirect mapping file is a spreadsheet that includes the following two columns:
- Legacy site URL –> a page’s URL on the old site.
- New site URL –> a page’s URL on the new site.
When mapping (redirecting) a page from the old to the new site, always try mapping it to the most relevant corresponding page. In cases where a relevant page doesn’t exist, avoid redirecting the page to the homepage. First and foremost, redirecting users to irrelevant pages results in a very poor user experience. Google has stated that redirecting pages “en masse” to irrelevant pages will be treated as soft 404s and because of this won’t be passing any SEO value. If you can’t find an equivalent page on the new site, try mapping it to its parent category page.
Once the mapping is complete, the file will need to be sent to the development team to create the redirects, so that these can be tested before launching the new site. The implementation of redirects is another part in the site migration cycle where things can often go wrong.
Increasing efficiencies during the redirect mapping process
Redirect mapping requires great attention to detail and needs to be carried out by experienced SEOs. The URL mapping on small sites could in theory be done by manually mapping each URL of the legacy site to a URL on the new site. But on large sites that consist of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages, manually mapping every single URL is practically impossible and automation needs to be introduced. Relying on certain common attributes between the legacy and new site can be a massive time-saver. Such attributes may include the page titles, H1 headings, or other unique page identifiers such as product codes, SKUs etc. Make sure the attributes you rely on for the redirect mapping are unique and not repeated across several pages; otherwise, you will end up with incorrect mapping.
Pro tip: Make sure the URL structure of the new site is 100% finalized on staging before you start working on the redirect mapping.
https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
Appendix: Useful tools
Crawlers
- Screaming Frog: The SEO Swiss army knife, ideal for crawling small- and medium-sized websites.
- Sitebulb: Very intuitive crawler application with a neat user interface, nicely organized reports, and many useful data visualizations.
- Deep Crawl: Cloud-based crawler with the ability to crawl staging sites and make crawl comparisons. Allows for comparisons between different crawls and copes well with large websites.
- Botify: Another powerful cloud-based crawler supported by exceptional server log file analysis capabilities that can be very insightful in terms of understanding how search engines crawl the site.
- On-Crawl: Crawler and server log analyzer for enterprise SEO audits with many handy features to identify crawl budget, content quality, and performance issues.
Handy Chrome add-ons
- Web developer: A collection of developer tools including easy ways to enable/disable JavaScript, CSS, images, etc.
- User agent switcher: Switch between different user agents including Googlebot, mobile, and other agents.
- Ayima Redirect Path: A great header and redirect checker.
- SEO Meta in 1 click: An on-page meta attributes, headers, and links inspector.
- Scraper: An easy way to scrape website data into a spreadsheet.
Site monitoring tools
- Uptime Robot: Free website uptime monitoring.
- Robotto: Free robots.txt monitoring tool.
- Pingdom tools: Monitors site uptime and page speed from real users (RUM service)
- SEO Radar: Monitors all critical SEO elements and fires alerts when these change.
- UltraDNS TOOLS change to DNS
Site performance tools
- NewRelic this is by far the most comprehensive site performance and site measuring tool listed. However the price is very steep it’s my favorite tool doesn’t mean it’s required.
- PageSpeed Insights: Measures page performance for mobile and desktop devices. It checks to see if a page has applied common performance best practices and provides a score, which ranges from 0 to 100 points.
- Lighthouse: Handy Chrome extension for performance, accessibility, Progressive Web Apps audits. Can also be run from the command line, or as a Node module.
- Webpagetest.org: Very detailed page tests from various locations, connections, and devices, including detailed waterfall charts.
- DareBoost very helpful & accurate as well. finding everything you need to know.
Structured data testing tools
- Google’s structured data testing tool & Google’s structured data testing tool Chrome extension
- Bing’s markup validator
- Yandex structured data testing tool
- Google’s rich results testing tool
Mobile testing tools
Backlink data sources
I hope this helps,Tom
-
You may want to:
1. Update your mycompany.com sitemap
2. Create an additional sitemap for your blog that sits on blog.mycompany.com
3. List both sitemaps or sitemap index files in your root robots.txt file
4. "Submit" the sitemaps to Google through Google Search Console. (I say "submit" because you really just point them to the URL. Their crawlers should find it regardless, however, this might make the discovery process swifter.)
In Google Search Console, you'll need to make sure you have claimed ownership (& verified) at the domain level. This will include your domain and new subdomain. It's up to you if you want to also claim ownership at the URL-prefix property so that blog.mycompany.com is broken out separately and can have the new blog sitemap added there. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does a similar CMS fabric/theme used by 2 colleagues, cause SEO issues?
Does using the same CMS fabric/theme with substantially different content for each website but the same business address (on google places and the websites) cause SEO issues? For example: 2 colleagues with somewhat similar services located at the same business addresses desire to use the same CMS fabric /theme but will have different content on the sites. Will this hurt their SEO / should they use a different website skin/theme?
Web Design | | toti5880 -
Disallow: /sr/ and Disallow: /si/ - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - I have come across the two directives above in a robots.txt file of a website - the web dev isn't sure what they meant although he implemented robots.txt - I think just legacy stuff that nobody has analysed for years - I vaguely recall sr means search request but can't remember. If any of you know what these directives do, then please let me know.
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Log-in page ranking but not homepage
Our homepage is outranked by log-in page for "primary keyword" in Google search results; for which actually our homepage was optimised. I have gone through the other answers for the same question here. But I couldn't find them related with our website. We are not over optimised. We have link from top navigation menu of blog to our homepage. Does this causing this?
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
Responsive image plugins and seo / crawlability
Note : For the background of this question please read the preface below. Ive been researching responsive image options the main issue i can see with them is that they are not semantic html so bots may not index them correctly. For instance many of the responsive image plugins use data-src for an image rather than src. Does any one have any experience with this and if it impacts on SEO ? Does any one know of a client side responsive image soltion that uses a normal img tag with the image stored in the src and with the option to set an alt attribute ? **Preface : ** Ive got a site we are currently developing, the site has a large full width responsive image slider. To serve images that wont be pixilated we are making the width of the images 1800px wide (which should cover most screens, but isn't actually big enough if the site was viewed on a 27" imac) these 1800px wide images weight about 350kb - 500kb per image and our image slider has about 20 of them. As you can see this would be a problem for anyone with a connection slower than c.10 mbps. This is especially true for mobile devices that will be downloading an image 1800px wide although only require a much smaller one, this coupled with a 3g connection will make the site really slow.
Web Design | | Sam-P0 -
Does a loading homepage animation effect rankings?
Our website ( panphoenix dot com) has a Javascript animation when you load it for the first time which takes just over 2 seconds to load. Does having this animation effect rankings negatively? Would appreciate your thoughts!Thanks Rob
Web Design | | roberthseo0 -
Mobile website strategy
Hello all! This question is about mobile websites. Any suggestions are welcomed. The facts: We have recently built a mobile website for our business using the separate mobile urls (parallel mobile website on a m. sub-domain). We are in the service industry and while our customers are most of the time on the go, it is important for them to find the price and order the service as fast and easy as possible. The redirect from desktop to mobile happens when customers are accessing the website with a mobile devices and it's done automatically. The mobile version does not have any content and serves only as a search and order function. The SEO has been made for the desktop website only and we are ranking really well for all competitive keywords in our niche. We want to keep the mobile website simple and clean so we are not planning to add any content on it.The questions: Since we are not planning to have much content on the mobile website, do we need to do any SEO for it? If yes, why? What are the benefits? Should we add content on the mobile website and why? Is there any down-side from an SEO perspective due to the fact that the website redirects to the mobile version? How are the inbound links going to behave in this case? Do we need to link these two websites although there is no risk about duplicate content? (links, canonical tags, sitemaps) Will the mobile website take advantage of the link building made for the desktop version? Should we allow the mobile website to be indexed having the fact that this is just a search & book tool? (at the moment it is blocked via robots.txt) Thanks for reading, looking forward to your answers.
Web Design | | echo10 -
Rephrasing my question: I have no search traffic -- I would love some feedback
I just posted a question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/am-i-on-the-right-track-still-not-seeing-results-in-rank-traffic-etc An it already has 63 views and one response, but I think I may have phrased the question wrong. I would love a little feedback on my site - I have zero search traffic -- none. I find that odd. I am not sure if it "just takes time" and I need to be patient, or if I am doing something really obviously wrong. I have been really amazed by what I have read so far in this community, and have learned a ton. In my previous question, I listed all the things I am doing -- and I think I have the basics down pat. Should I not have at least 1 visitor per day? Any feedback would be appreciated. Thank you so much!!
Web Design | | WendyKKelly0 -
Java-script slider & H1 tags
If you have a java-script slider on the homepage, each slide has an H1 tag heading, which of the H1 tags would google most likely consider? all of them or just the first one?
Web Design | | GraphicMail0