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
-
What is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years. We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items? Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimJ3 -
SEO for Career sites and sup-pages
For main job categories: We manage several career pages for several clients but the competition for the main keywords (even several long tail) is from big names like Indeed and similar job boards?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rflores
What would you recommend? For job posts: Since the job posts that our clients post are short lived (80% live less than a month) would it still be incorrect to purchase backlinks? or is it always a big no Thanks for your help. And if a similar question has been asked I would appreciate if you could point me to it. I could not find one.0 -
Is one of my competitors trying to get my site penalized?
Hi guys, I have been ranking #2 for a popular search term for several months now, and today I noticed a drop to #5, so I went to check my backlink profile, and I'm seeing thousands of no-follow exact keyword matched backlinks, all from spammy looking websites. I looked at some of the links and they do link to me, but I didn't generate these links, and I have never paid anybody externally to build links for me. What is the best course of action for me here? link disavow tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | davegill0 -
Can I Point Multiple Exact Match Domains to a Primary Domain? (Avoiding Duplicate Content)
For example, lets say I have these 3 domains: product1.com product2.com product.com The first 2 domains will have very similar text content, with different products. The product.com domain will be similar content, with all of the products in one place. Transactions would be handled through the Primary domain (product.com) The purpose of this would be to capitalize on the Exact match domain opportunities. I found this seemingly old article: http://www.thesitewizard.com/domain/point-multiple-domains-one-website.shtml The article states that you can avoid duplicate content issues, and have all links attributed to the Primary domain. What do you guys think about this? Is it possible? Is there a better way of approaching this while still taking advantage of the EMD?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Redesigning my site, and not sure what is best for seo, subfolders or direct .html links?
,I have 4 examples to choose from, what is best:? http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | hoodamath0 -
Has my site been penalized by google
Hi all I have noticed a sudden drop in rankings for most of my keywords on kerryblu ,co,uk and was thinking the site may have been manually penalized by google. I have not received any notification of this in webmaster tools but can't think of any other reason for the loss of rankings. I have searched the web for info on this but can't find a definite answer. Is there any way of knowing for sure. At the time of the crash the only real change I made was adding google adsense to my blog. Could this be responsible. Thanks for looking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dill0 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750 -
Should I 301 Redirect a Site with an 'Unnatural Link' Warning?
Hey Fellow Mozzers, I have recently been approached by a new client that has been issued with an 'Unnatural Link' warning and lost almost all of their rankings. Open Site Explorer shows a ton of spammy links all using main keyword anchor text and there are way too many of them to even consider manually getting them removed. There are two glimmers of hope for the client; The first is that the spammy links are dropping off at a rate of about 25 per week; The second is that they own both the .com and the .co.uk domain for their business. I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to handle this, should I :- Wait it out for some of the spammy links to drop off whilst at the same time pushing social media and build some good clean links using the URL and brand as anchor text? Then submit a recosideration request? Switch the website over from the .com domain to the .co.uk domain and carry out a 301 redirect? Switch the website over from the .com to the .co.uk without doing a redirect and start again for the client with a clean slate? I would still register an address change via Webmaster Tools. Add a duplicate site on the .co.uk domain. Leave the .com site in place but rel="canonical" the entire domain over to the .co.uk Any advice would be very much apprecited. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0