Site redesign what to consider to avoid any issues
-
Hi GUYS
I want to avoid getting myself into a bad situation with google, so I'm just wanting to know if there are any steps I would need to take whilst I'm redesigning and developing my site as I'm currently deploying our new designs.
One thing I noticed, i have my new designs and content on our development server to run through any checks before deploying it to the live environment, however while our live site is up, I have duplicate content on the live site that exactly matches the dev site for obvious reasons but do I need to tell google that the dev site is for development purposes only so google knows I'm not duplicating content?
I have searched around to find some more info about this, if anyone has some insight i would be glad to know your thoughts.
Thank you in advance
-
What I usually do is set the website up on a staging area set up at example.com and modify my local host file with the ip address of the staging area with domain and access the site via example.com
-
Glad to help, Justin. Also, remember when you go live with the site to take the development site offline or secure it in a way where regular web traffic can't get to it. Otherwise you risk visitor confusion.
-
Hi Justin,
This time also I'm sharing an article on this because there are several checkpoints . Please check below article
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/
Hope this helps.
thanks
-
wow, thanks so much guys! I definitely needed a step by step guide to give my developer! Once these have been done, how would I go about checking and making sure that its all been done correctly by my developer?
-
Hi Justin,
IMO first you need to noindex to your test site (new design site) .Please add following code in header of every page
It's important to know that
User-agent: *
Disallow: /is to block the site in the Robots.txt file is not sufficient. The meta-tags are the important part. If you skip those and only use robots.txt your site could still end up being crawled.
You are looking for step by step Guide so I'm sharing two very informative articles in case of redesign website for SEO purpose
1>http://moz.com/blog/how-to-avoid-an-seo-disaster-when-changing-your-website
Hope it helps you.
Thanks
-
Perfect! Thanks so much Vic Marcus!
-
When we went through a similar process for our company last year, we set up a development site under a sub-domain and no-indexed all the pages under it. That prevented any duplicate content issues for us. Once going live, we allowed indexing and following of certain pages.
Another way to do it is to edit your robots.txt and disallow all access to the development site.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
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
-
How to redirect 301 from high authority sites to own website?
How to redirect 301 from high authority sites to own website? If anyone know can tell me, such gigs are selling on the Fiverr.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jefjaa0 -
Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarkHodson0 -
Scraped site, hijacked searches for business name.
Hello, I have a site that was scraped (possibly by a competitor's seo company), who then built links to the duplicate site. When people do a search for the name of the business the scraped site is all that comes up along with the usual third-party sites. They seem to take the site down and put it back up every couple of weeks to maintain the rankings in Google. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this? Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated. Search: LIC Dental Associates Scraped site: old-farmshow.net Legit site: licdentalassociates.com Thanks, Emery
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tntdental1 -
How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity. Some obvious things:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SoundsLikeJoy
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEO My client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool. I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up. Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.0 -
Partner Site In Bound Links
We have a staffing agency client that uses a 3rd party site (with different URL) to display open jobs for web viewers to see. However we are getting a bunch of backlinks from this site from the footer because it is set up as a White Label... Should I add a rel=nofollow to the links in the footer? Disavow the links from the site? Do nothing? I am not really sure. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aqabatech0 -
Failed microsites that negatively affect main site: should I just redirect them all?
While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ElBo9130 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Client Selling Links On One Site Hurt Their Other Site?
Hi, I have a client who is thinking about selling ads on one site they own via something like textlinkads.com. Do you think they run any risk of exposing their other sites to scrutiny, penalties or problems?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010