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
-
Redirect chains after a site migration
Hi A clients site was originally canonicalised to the www. from the non www versions Now its migrating to an international config of www.domain.com/uk and www.domain.com/us with the existing pages/urls (such as www.domain.com/pageA) 301'd to the new www.domain.com/uk/pageA for example Will this will create a 301 redirect chain due to the existence of the original canonicalised urls or is the way that works 'catch all' so to speak, and automatically update the canonical 301 redirects of the non www old architexcture url's to the new international architecture URL's ? I presume so but just want to check ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content Question (E-Commerce Site)
Hi All, I have a page that ranks well for the keyword “refurbished Xbox 360”. The ranking page is an eCommerce product details page for a particular XBOX 360 system that we do not currently have in stock (currently, we do not remove a product details page from the website, even if it sells out – as we bring similar items into inventory, e.g. more XBOX 360s, new additional pages are created for them). Long story short, given this way of doing things, we have now accumulated 79 “refurbished XBOX 360” product details pages across the website that currently, or at some point in time, reflected some version of a refurbished XBOX 360 in our inventory. From an SEO standpoint, it’s clear that we have a serious duplicate content problem with all of these nearly identical XBOX 360 product pages. Management is beginning to question why our latest, in-stock, XBOX 360 product pages aren't ranking and why this stale, out-of-stock, XBOX 360 product page still is. We are in obvious need of a better process for retiring old, irrelevant (product) content and eliminating duplicate content, but the question remains, how exactly is Google choosing to rank this one versus the others since they are primarily duplicate pages? Has Google simply determined this one to be the original? What would be the best practice approach to solving a problem like this from an SEO standpoint – 301 redirect all out of stock pages to in stock pages, remove the irrelevant page? Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Justin
Technical SEO | | JustinGeeks0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0 -
Site not indexing correctly
I am trying to figure out what is going on with my site listings. Google is only displaying my title and url - no description. You can see it when you search for Franchises for Sale. The site is www.franchisesolutions.com. Why could this happen? Also I saw a big drop off in a handful of keyword rankings today. Could this be related?
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions0 -
Rel Canonical Question
I changed /tulsa-cleaning-services/ to /services/ because the URLs were getting too long. Now I'm getting an error for Appropriate use of Rel Canonical. I used a 301 to send old links to the new location. Any ideas? Thanks! Will www.americancarpetclean.com
Technical SEO | | WillWatrous0 -
Video question
If another company hosts our videos, but they are only found embedded on our site, do we get all of the SEO benefits from the video, or would we have to host it for that to happen?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
301 Redirect Question
I'm working on a site that has a lot of indexed pages and backlinks to both domain.com and www.domain.com. Will using a 301 redirect to send domain.com to www.domain.com merge all of the indexed pages and links over to www.domain.com, thereby strengthening the www?
Technical SEO | | Yo_Adrian0