Website Migration Query
-
We are going to migrate our site but we cannot do this gradually, so before we complete the whole migration, we were thinking of launching the new site on a sub-domain and gradually redirect traffic to the sub-domain, starting with 10%, moving up steadily so that we then migrate to the new site within four/five weeks.
The new site will have a new URL structure on the same domain, with a complete re-design and the IP address will be changing as well, even though the server geographical location will remain the same.
a) Should we noindex the new sub-domain while the new site is on trial?
b) Are there any other issues we should look out for?
Thanks in Advance
-
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for taking time to help us out as well.
We are checking out your recommendations, especially interesting is learning from Moz's experience.
Kindest Regards
Luciano
-
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for taking time to help us out.
Since you rightly pointed out that forwarding traffic gradually to a “/disallow” sub-domain will hurt us, we were thinking of taking this course:
- Roll out the new site on a /test/ sub-domain with the “disallow” / “no index” instructions
- Invite some visitors (also via geo-targeting) to click on a banner asking them to visit our new site (We will try not to redirect too much traffic to /test/)
- Monitor this limited traffic to weed out any problems and use crawling tools to crawl the website for two weeks, identifying and correcting any errors in the process
- Remove pages from /test/ and push new website “live”
Looking forward to your feedback.
Kindest Regards
Luciano
-
I would echo what Jeff says and take care of the migration all at once, otherwise you're bound to have duplicate issues and create a lot more work for yourself, and possibly cleaning-up to do too.
Migrations can get mega-complex, and thorough preparation is key.
I'd recommend reading this: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
watching Moz's own migration lessons learned Mozinar: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
and checking out Aleyda Solis' actually very useful infographic for migration considerations: http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
Best of luck.
-
Honestly, I don't the the gradual migration to the new site is a very good idea. If you take the route you've outlined, you're likely going to drop in the rankings due to duplicate content issues, or just the fact that you are no-indexing content. Once you no-index content, it can sometimes take quite a while for the content to be re-indexed after you remove the no-index restriction.
I'd instead recommend putting up the new site in a development / test area. If this is one a different subdomain, that's fine for now, but you should no-index / no-follow the test site.
Once everything is ready, flip the switch to have the DNS point to the new IP address for the new site, and then disable the existing site. In order to decrease DNS caching issues, you may wish to set the TTL (time to live) for the A records down to 300 seconds or so.
As your URL stucture is changing, you will want to make sure that the URLS are all 301 redirected to their new location. You can do this with a mod rewrite rule (if everything is changing from .aspx --> .php), or manually map out each page and put them in your .htaccess file.
I would test these out on a site like the http://httpstatus.io/ site to make sure it works properly.
And my recommendation is not to do the changeover on a Friday afternoon, unless you want to spend the whole weekend troubleshooting issues on the site.
Once the site is live, make sure things like the contact forms are working, and that any images on the old site are also moved over if possible (as you might be using them in email campaigns, etc.).
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
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
-
Questions about the DA,PA of website
I am counting on some more ads on the site https://gogoanime.city/, is it a problem if I add some ads about sex, porn ..., to make a little more money. So does it affect the PA DA score. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | gogoanimetp0 -
Amp version of website
Hello & thanks for reading its maybe the monday morning blues but i have two versions of a website - www.gardeners.scot and www.gardeners.scot/AMP/ the pages on the amp version have canonicals pointing to the "normal" website Should the links on "www.example.com/AMP/" point to the amp website or the normal website? what are your thougths?
Technical SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
SEO for Parallax Website
Hi, Are there any implications of having a parallax website and the URL not changing as you scroll down the page? So basically the whole site is under the same URL? However, when you click on the menu the URL does change? Cheers
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
What is the optimum schema for a Website and how important is it really is for SEO?
Hey everyone,
Technical SEO | | artdivision
As you all probably has seen Google has changed their structure testing tool and alongside that has also changed what is considered as valid and not valid. I have been struggling with this question for quite a while now where opinions are really split. **1. How important is Schema for SEO? **
2. How far should you go Schema'ing your website pages? From the one hand i can see how it can be easier for a BOT to read a code that has proper "road signs" (our schemas markups), on the other hands, Google is already extremely clever is working out what is the header, sidebar or footer as well as review and or a blog posts (especially for those of us who use Wordpress. Would love to know if someone has seen a "Like to Like" show case with schemas and/or have some factual information regarding what should or shouldn't be done when it comes ot Schema. Dan. x1aw0 -
Sudden drop in website ranking
Since past 2 week my website www.micromaxtablet.in is experiencing sudden drops in the site ranking. I can understand this regression in the site ranking is not because of Goggle Panda update, and their is some other reason. Kindly let me know what could be the other possibilities, and plz also suggest how to get it fixed. Keyword for which the site had the best rankings (in top 3) was "micromax tablet". Now it shows on the second page in the google search and to make it worse, it's losing its position almost every second day.
Technical SEO | | nishant9110 -
SIte cloned my entire website and is now outranking me
My site is http://www.medic8.com and http://www.mealldubh.org has cloned my site and is now outranking my site. I have submitted DMCA requests to Google with no response. I do not know what to do now but surely it should be obvoius that this site has cloned me and there must be a way to have this scraper removed from the index? Im lost in terms of what I can do next so any help would be greatly appreacited.
Technical SEO | | thefresh0 -
How to avoid automated queries to Google
We have a search engine marketing team working on different projects and we share same IP. We check our rankings manually on Google, is it sending automated queries to Google? Can it affect our sites? What solution do you suggest to check rankings without sending multiple queries to Google?
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0