Site Migration Questions
-
Hello everyone,
We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic.
One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply.
My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that?
Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
-
Andrew thank you for your response. Our next hurdle is that they are wanting to leave the .net up while the .com is also up. Two different designs, similar if not the same content on every page. I'm pushing for internal IP only testing then launch in the middle of the night so we can roll back if there are issues. I mean with thorough testing there shouldn't be but I know anything is possible.
-
Hey Sika22,
I think the first order of business is to let the webmaster/redesign lead know the penalties and risks they face. IMO, your first problem ought to be that of managing expectations; not the technical.
Their insistence to combine a dramatic redesign and adds risk to the SEO, and you simply don't know until launch. Any hit that the website takes ought to be on the manager that's blocking your requests, and not on your shoulders (I prefer email so there's a trail you can refer back to). If you've already done that/unable to—just a thought!
That said, we work we all have our constraints when we work, don't we?
And we always do our best. Per your concerns:
- "Instead of having a product page for each product"; I'd try to try to find a way to pitch that they create a "for more info, click here" link on the parallax page. It seems like someone responsible for pushing this redesign is seriously concerned about SEO/keywords (I pull that from your next point about them trying to inject keywords per product name). If that's the case, I'd pitch the product pages like: "Look, if we don't create product pages, we're wasting plenty of great link juice. There's a pretty decent chance we're going to take a hit on every high-ranking landing page we remove. We're removing additional points of discovery into one page with lesser focus."
- "Keywords-for-products"— last I heard, the importance of exact-match url's aren't as useful. You want exact match keywords usage in the content of the page to increase on-page relevancy. Just stuffing the URL isn't going to pull the relevancy up. Whoever is pitching the "let's append keywords to the url" idea ought to see this list of "Moz Search Ranking Factors" (survey). AFAIK, the exact match url isn't a strong enough signal to make it onto this list.
That's what I would do if I were in your shoes. First, set expectations for the changes so that—in case things get worse—you've aired out your worries. Make everyone think twice (and maybe come up with contingencies—it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you flat). Then, keep pitching for the ideas that will you think will help you do your job as an SEO!
Best of luck! — Andrew
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
-
Site Not Being Indexed
Hey Everyone - I have a site that is being treated strangely by google (at least strange to me) The site has 24 pages in the sitemap - submitted to WMT'S over 30 days ago I've manually triggered google to crawl the homepage and all connecting links as well and submitted a couple individually. Google has been parked the indexing at 14 of the 24 pages. None of the unindexed URL's have Noindex or follow tags on them - they are clearly and easily linked to from other places on the site. The site is a brand new domain, has no manual penalty history and in my research has no reason to be considered spammy. 100% unique handwritten content I cannot figure out why google isn't indexing these pages. Has anyone encountered this before? Know any solutions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CRO_first0 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
Questions on switching domain name of my site
Hey guys, I purchased a domain name on May 1st and have been running my site on it since then. At the time when I added the domain name to the shopping cart, I felt that it was the best domain name a human could possibly come up with. But now, after two months, I am not so sure about it. And that means I am thinking of getting a new domain name and redirecting the old domain to the new one. Give that the domain is only two months old, there is not much to lose. However, my domain name does have some valuable backlinks, and has built some credibility in the eyes of search engines. According to MOZ Open Site Explorer, its Domain Authority is 10 and Page Authority (homepage) is 20. It's not much, but I fear that if I switch the domain name, I will reset the clock and the new domain name will have to earn the rankings from scratch That said, after searching this forum, I come across articles like this one from google and this 2012 article from MOZ that gave me some confidence. The MOZ article is from 2102, and there have been several changes since then. Is there an updated version of that article, or another legit article on the internet that you can point me to? As you can tell, I want to be more than sure that we don't take any hit during the migration process. Also want to mention that the site is on WordPress -- in case that is relevant. Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | deathbyseo0 -
Open Site Explorer Question
In OSE I have 3 of my top 5 pages as store.com, store.com/Default.asp, and store.com/default.asp -- I have a canonical version of at store.com/default.asp. I have inbound links coming to all three urls -- b/c OSE is listing these as seperate pages does that mean the link juice is not being consolidated? Or is this not something to worry about?
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
Popup Question
Hi Everyone, I have a question. Your input will be very much appreciated. My company's new website design is using a popup. I have some reservation about it and I want to know what your thoughts are. Ok, some information on what this popup is like. When a user clicks on a subcategory page, there's a popup that would ask for size, color, etc - it's like a form and those are the criteria. If nothing is selected, the product list on the subcategory page doesn't load - so the only thing is showing is the the H1 and description but everything else is empty. When a user does select a criteria the landing page is no longer the subcategory but another page with that ID. So basically the user never really land on the subcategory page but to another page with a different query string. Is this bad for SEO? Would you recommend to keep the popup? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | truckguy770 -
Keyword targeting by page, site, or both?
Hi, We recently discovered that a product we sell has a misnomer, and that a ton of people take to Google and use variations of that misnomer while trying to find us. Unfortunately we don't rank in Google for this keyword, and its costing us thousands in lost sales. I've been slowly building the misnomer into the content of our site in hopes that the spiders will pick up on it. It has started to work in the last couple weeks, but we're nowhere near the top (and we are #1 and #2 for most of our other prime keywords.) The site which sells the product is specialized, and only sells this specific product (in different models, but they're all the same product essentially.) With that in mind, I'm trying to figure out the best way to attack a new keyword. I know that normally you would dedicate a specific page (in an eCommerce store probably that product's own page) to employ your SEO tactics. However, because this site specializes in this product and offers different models and information about it I'm confused about the best approach. Does Google take into consideration the entire site a s whole, or are the pages within my site competing against each other for rank?
Technical SEO | | ninjaprecision0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Schema address question
I have a website that has a contact us page... of course and on that page I have schema info pointing out the address and a few other points of data. I also have the address to the business location in the footer on every page. Would it be wiser to point to the schema address data on the footer instead of the contact page? And are there any best practices when it comes down to how many times you can point to the same data, and on which pages? So should I have schema address on the contact us page and the footer of that page, that would be twice, which could seem spammy. Haven't been able to find much best practices info on schema out there. Thanks, Cy
Technical SEO | | Nola5040