Preserving rankings after migration
-
I have acquired new a client who wants to migrate to a new platform. He also wants a 100% guarantee we maintain he Google search rankings. How realistic is this? Anyone got a checklist they can recommend?
-
The client sells school uniforms. I have now discovered he has created a number of 'hub' pages which simply contain lists of school names for each region, where each of the school names link to a page of fairly banal blurb about each school.
Given that he does not sell uniforms for most of these schools, it looks like classic keyword stuffing.
This being the case, surely it wouldn't be wise to preserve this type of content, even though this strategy has gotten him some pretty good rankings?
-
Thanks James.
The client has already said he wants to change look and feel, possibly the navigation too. So I suspect too many changes to avoid some SEO flux.
-
If there's a CMS change, then yes, I agree with Brandon that it's a completely unrealistic request. I've provided SEO support on dozens of site migrations, and there's always some initial loss, even when you check all the boxes on every migration list you can find.
The only way that this is possible is if you're reskinning of a site, a la choosing a new theme in WP where URLs don't change and on-page opt stay the same. And even then, with all the UX considerations in Google's algo, you're still likely to see some flux.
-
Thanks Brandon. I tend to agree with you. Just too many variables outside of my control.
Given that they are moving to Shopify, which means 'collections' and 'products' added to URLs, it's clearly impossible to maintain continuity in URLs and site/nav structure.
Nightmare!
-
A guarantee is not realistic at all. Even if you make the new site better, while retaining as much of its integrity as possible, your rankings will fluctuate and some keywords may even drop. In fact, the client is actually asking for you to guarantee rankings, which Google explicitly dismisses.
Your #1 goal when performing a migration is to maintain content integrity for every page. In a perfect world, you would maintain the integrity of the site in its entirety, but with a platform change that cannot be done.
So simply said: every page on Site A should be maintained as much as possible on Site B, while Page A-Z on Site A redirects to the proper Page A-Z on Site B. This means everything that you can preserve reasonably, you should preserve and the appropriate redirects should be in place. It goes without saying, but all elements like URLs, page titles, H1s, etc. are to be maintained.
-
Thank you James. Very useful.
The current site is custom-built in PHP, moving to Shopify. So straight away, I know the URLs and site structure cannot be the same. There's also a very good chance they will move from http to https. I've seen several sites drop page authority when this happens.
Doesn't sound promising does it?!
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
-
Essential to Have a Blog to Rank Well?
I have noticed that several competitors that rank very well rarely update their blogs, www.42floors.com for instance. We are redesigning our commercial real estate Wordpress website in the hopes of improving traffic, ranking and conversions. How critical is it to invest resources on creating and categorizing blog posts? Is frequently updating a blog post less necessary in late 2018? Curious to hear how much effort we should take to create new blog content and whether or not it will assist us in a competitive niche. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan12 -
Wrong Pages Ranking
Good Afternoon We had an issue a while ago with the incorrect pages ranking in Google for some of our key terms. For example the page ranking for the term in Hotels in Spain was an individual information page for one particular hotel in Spain rather than the top level page which is optimised for "Hotels in Spain" The individual property page was ranking around 36-40 so we tightened up all the internal linking structure to ensure the term "Hotels in Spain" was pointing to the correct page and de-optimised the individual property page for the term. After a few weeks, everything seemed to be working and we were ranking top of second page for correct page however, ranking report today has reversed our good fortune and the incorrect page is ranking in a low position Any further suggestions or advise would be very much appreciated. Ideally, I don't want to remove the page that is ranking as it's still relevant for a search for that particular hotel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Finding Ranking for search term and increasing ranking
Hi. The company that I'm working with would like to rank highly in google for certain generic search terms (dentist, dentists, etc.). Certain websites the company has used to rank highly in google for generic keywords, but has not for years now since google has revised their algorithm so many times. Moz lists that the company websites are not found in the top 51+ results in google. My first question is: **Is there a way, apart from manually searching the results, to find the ranking position of the website in google? **Ideally, I would like to find a program that will do this. Second, I've been reading a lot of the great articles and comments on Moz, and I've been learning a lot more about SEO. My focus has shifted to spending more attention on User Experience and Social Media instead of placing the exact keywords in the pages / tags of the website. What area(s) should I be focusing on to best increase the ranking of the company website for certain generic terms? Ideally, I'd like to create good quality content, so that users will not instantly click away. I appreciate any thoughts or comments. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | americasmiles0 -
What is wrong with my once highly ranked site?
Hello, I'm really desperate for some help. I believe I've been hit by Panda as traffic started diminishing late March for my 6 year old website. I've never had a sharp drop, only gradual. I've lost a load traffic since then. I did change shopping carts in June since I had a a canonical issue from my old cart that couldn't be corrected. The old cart also did not allow me to have unique product titles and the urls were garbled with letters, numbers, etc... I know Panda did not like that. I've made several changes (cleaned up broken links, added more content to my site, added Disallow: /search/ and Disallow: /search to my robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content from my search box.) My most prized keywords (tutu and tutus) are on page 15 or so of Google now, when they used to be on page 1 or 2 at the worst. Other good ones are slipping too. I do need to hire an SEO to optimize my titles eventually as I believe my they are still a bit stuffed but before I do that, I am just trying to get the other stuff done first. My main questions are this... Do any of you see something else that looks bad to you in the eyes of Google? I'd love the cold, hard truth as I'm pretty desperate for my site to recover, if at all possible. Thank you in advance! Here is my site: http://alturl.com/mvmux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tutugirl0 -
Rankings going down down down
Hi guys, I know this is a little open ended, but any advice/ideas would be greatly appreciated. I launched a new site about 3 months ago (www.transfersandshuttles.co.za). I have had unique, useful articles written for it, and the site does provide a useful service. I have done a little link building and continue to do so. The site was making decent progress moving up the rankings for a few weeks, but now it just seems to get worse and worse.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
I'm not looking for an entire site audit or strategy here, just if anything jumps out at you that seems very poor for seo, please let me know. Thanks so much,
Marc0 -
Wrong page being ranked
Hi there, This seems a bit of a strange one, I have a particular keyword which I am trying to rank for, all internal links with the appropriate anchor text are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, all external links are pointing to the page I want to rank for, for this particular keyword, however Google is ranking another page on my website for this keyword and the bizarre things is the page which is being ranked is a .PDF I am really not sure what else to do to give Google the hint that they are ranking the wrong page, any ideas? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
Hey guys, I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google. sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearetribe
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead. Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking. Did I get some kind of penalty?0