Website Redesign & Ensuring Minimal Traffic/Rankings Lost
-
Hi there,
We have undergone a website redesign (mycompany.com) and our site is ready to go live however the new website is built on a different platform so all of our blog pages will not be copied over - to avoid a large web developer expense.
So our intention is to then leave all the blog pages as (on the old web design) but move it to the domain blog.mycompany.com with 301 redirects inserted on mycompany.com for each blog post pointing to the corresponding blog.mycompany.com. Is there anything else we should do to ensure minimal traffic/rankings are lost?
Thank you so much for your help.
-
Having performed maybe upwards of 80 & without any real traffic loss for more than a week. It is because I follow the rules very thoroughly when you get to the bottom of this how do you please use one of the crawlers mentioned
use a complete search and replace when necessary across the entire site just to make sure everything’s in place.
I don’t know what type of website you’re running however if it is WordPress or if you I want toget some extra traffic I would make sure that the blog is a sub folder. if it is WordPress you can do this on a managed managed host platform like Pagely , ServeBolt or Kinsta for just $50 a month.
Redirect mapping process
If you are lucky enough to work on a migration that doesn’t involve URL changes, you could skip this section. Otherwise, read on to find out why any legacy pages that won’t be available on the same URL after the migration should be redirected.
The redirect mapping file is a spreadsheet that includes the following two columns:
- Legacy site URL –> a page’s URL on the old site.
- New site URL –> a page’s URL on the new site.
When mapping (redirecting) a page from the old to the new site, always try mapping it to the most relevant corresponding page. In cases where a relevant page doesn’t exist, avoid redirecting the page to the homepage. First and foremost, redirecting users to irrelevant pages results in a very poor user experience. Google has stated that redirecting pages “en masse” to irrelevant pages will be treated as soft 404s and because of this won’t be passing any SEO value. If you can’t find an equivalent page on the new site, try mapping it to its parent category page.
Once the mapping is complete, the file will need to be sent to the development team to create the redirects, so that these can be tested before launching the new site. The implementation of redirects is another part in the site migration cycle where things can often go wrong.
Increasing efficiencies during the redirect mapping process
Redirect mapping requires great attention to detail and needs to be carried out by experienced SEOs. The URL mapping on small sites could in theory be done by manually mapping each URL of the legacy site to a URL on the new site. But on large sites that consist of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages, manually mapping every single URL is practically impossible and automation needs to be introduced. Relying on certain common attributes between the legacy and new site can be a massive time-saver. Such attributes may include the page titles, H1 headings, or other unique page identifiers such as product codes, SKUs etc. Make sure the attributes you rely on for the redirect mapping are unique and not repeated across several pages; otherwise, you will end up with incorrect mapping.
Pro tip: Make sure the URL structure of the new site is 100% finalized on staging before you start working on the redirect mapping.
https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
Appendix: Useful tools
Crawlers
- Screaming Frog: The SEO Swiss army knife, ideal for crawling small- and medium-sized websites.
- Sitebulb: Very intuitive crawler application with a neat user interface, nicely organized reports, and many useful data visualizations.
- Deep Crawl: Cloud-based crawler with the ability to crawl staging sites and make crawl comparisons. Allows for comparisons between different crawls and copes well with large websites.
- Botify: Another powerful cloud-based crawler supported by exceptional server log file analysis capabilities that can be very insightful in terms of understanding how search engines crawl the site.
- On-Crawl: Crawler and server log analyzer for enterprise SEO audits with many handy features to identify crawl budget, content quality, and performance issues.
Handy Chrome add-ons
- Web developer: A collection of developer tools including easy ways to enable/disable JavaScript, CSS, images, etc.
- User agent switcher: Switch between different user agents including Googlebot, mobile, and other agents.
- Ayima Redirect Path: A great header and redirect checker.
- SEO Meta in 1 click: An on-page meta attributes, headers, and links inspector.
- Scraper: An easy way to scrape website data into a spreadsheet.
Site monitoring tools
- Uptime Robot: Free website uptime monitoring.
- Robotto: Free robots.txt monitoring tool.
- Pingdom tools: Monitors site uptime and page speed from real users (RUM service)
- SEO Radar: Monitors all critical SEO elements and fires alerts when these change.
- UltraDNS TOOLS change to DNS
Site performance tools
- NewRelic this is by far the most comprehensive site performance and site measuring tool listed. However the price is very steep it’s my favorite tool doesn’t mean it’s required.
- PageSpeed Insights: Measures page performance for mobile and desktop devices. It checks to see if a page has applied common performance best practices and provides a score, which ranges from 0 to 100 points.
- Lighthouse: Handy Chrome extension for performance, accessibility, Progressive Web Apps audits. Can also be run from the command line, or as a Node module.
- Webpagetest.org: Very detailed page tests from various locations, connections, and devices, including detailed waterfall charts.
- DareBoost very helpful & accurate as well. finding everything you need to know.
Structured data testing tools
- Google’s structured data testing tool & Google’s structured data testing tool Chrome extension
- Bing’s markup validator
- Yandex structured data testing tool
- Google’s rich results testing tool
Mobile testing tools
Backlink data sources
I hope this helps,Tom
-
You may want to:
1. Update your mycompany.com sitemap
2. Create an additional sitemap for your blog that sits on blog.mycompany.com
3. List both sitemaps or sitemap index files in your root robots.txt file
4. "Submit" the sitemaps to Google through Google Search Console. (I say "submit" because you really just point them to the URL. Their crawlers should find it regardless, however, this might make the discovery process swifter.)
In Google Search Console, you'll need to make sure you have claimed ownership (& verified) at the domain level. This will include your domain and new subdomain. It's up to you if you want to also claim ownership at the URL-prefix property so that blog.mycompany.com is broken out separately and can have the new blog sitemap added there. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592
Hope this helps!
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
-
Website removed from Bing and Yahoo index
Hi, are website servicemanualrepairs.com was removed from Bing and Yahoo index, I emailed Bing via Webmaster tools they first said it was Backlinks I did look via at the inbound links tool to analyze the site's Backlinks I did find 20 links and used the Disavow tool, they said "I'm afraid but after careful and thorough investigation, your site still did not meet the Bing and Microsoft guidelines You may also refer to the things to avoid section of the Webmaster Guidelines for additional information. As an effect, the site is still blocked and it cannot be lifted" the website was in Bing and Yahoo index for 3 Years and only after the 20 Backlinks were added to the site it was de-index any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | vista5211 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Could our drop in organic rankings have been caused by improper mobile site set-up?
Site: 12 year old financial service 'information' site with lead gen business model. Historically has held top 10 positions for top keywords and phrases. Background: The organic traffic from Google has fallen to 50% of what it was over the past 4 months compared to the same months last year. While several potential factors could be responsible/contributing (not limited to my pro-active removal of a dozen old emat links that may be perceived as unnatural despite no warning), this drop coincides with the same period the 'mobile site' was launched. Because I admittedly know the least about this potential cause, I am turning to the forum for assistance. Because the site is ~200 pages and contains many 'custom' pages with financial tables, forms, data pulled from 3rd parties, custom/different layouts we opted for creating a mobile site of only the top 12 most popular pages/topics just to have a mobile presence (instead of re-coding the entire site to make it responsive utilizing a mobile css). -These mobile pages were set up in an "m." subdomain. -We used bi-directional tagging placing a rel=canonical tag on the mobile page, and a rel=alternate tag on the desktop page. This created a loop between the pages, as advised by Google. -Some mobile pages used content from a sub page, not the primary desktop page for a particular topic. This may have broken the bi-directional 'loop', meaning the rel=canonical on the mobile page would point to a subpage, where the rel=alternate would point to the primary desktop page, even though the content did not come from that page, necessarily. The primary desktop page is the one that ranks for related keywords. In these cases, the "loop" would be broken. Is this a cause for concern? Could the authority held by the desktop page not be transferred to the mobile version, or the mobile page 'pull away' or disperse the strength of the desktop page if that 'loop' was not connected? Could not setting up the bi-directional tags correctly cause a drop in the organic rankings? -Our developer verified the site is set up according to Google's guidelines for identifying device screen size and serving appropriate version of page. -Are there any tools or utilities that I can use to identify issues, and/or verify everything is configured correctly? -Are we missing anything important in the set-up/configuration? -Could the use of a brand new subdomain 'm.' in and of itself be causing issues? -Have I identified any negative seo practices or pitfalls? Am I missing or overlooking something? While i would have preferred maintaining a single, responsive, site with mobile css, it was not realistic given the various layouts, and owner's desire to only offer the top pages in mobile format. The mobile site may have nothing to do with the organic drop, but I'd like to rule it out if so, and I have so many questions. If anyone could address my concerns, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Greg
Web Design | | seagreen0 -
Nesting <a>tag for rel="nofollow"</a>
I just wanted to quickly run this past someone. I have some footer links I want set to nofollow: <map <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">name</map>="Map"><area <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">shape="rect" coords="10,39,73,101" href="URL" target="_blank" alt="some text"> should this be <map <span class="webkit-html-tag">name</map <span>="Map"><area <span class="webkit-html-tag">shape</area <span>="rect" coords="10,39,73,101 <a <span class="webkit-html-tag">href="URL" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" alt="some text"></a <span> Want to check before I advise. If this is not the way how can I fix?
Web Design | | MickEdwards0 -
Does Google follow links inside a <noscript>tag?</noscript>
I'm looking at making an embedable calculator and asking users to embed it to their website. I had the idea of using javascript to include the calculator which would also conatain a text link back to my site in order to gain some back links. If it's possible Google won't see the link (as they may not execute the javascript), is it safe to place the link in the <noscript>tag? If so, Will it be indexed and will Page Rank be passed?</span></p> <p>Thanks in advance for your answers. </p> <p>Anthony</p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span></p></noscript>
Web Design | | BallyhooLtd0 -
Are links from main page to inner pages will affect on ranking?
About 3 weeks ago I converted index.html to index.php. Both are 301 redirect to main url. Also I have about 70 links on main page pointing to internal pages. The Website is about 11 years old,and was on active link building . Is this conversion from html to php and also 70 links pointing to inner pages will affect on ranking?Since all links are passing juice to inner pages.
Web Design | | LosAngelesLimo0 -
Suggestions for content slider/image slider copy/paste application.
Hey Moz Community, I am looking for a content slider that can be easily changed by non-technicals for posting different styles of content/calls to action and this seems to be best: http://www.slidedeck.com/ I have installed a nivo slider on a Seattle Painting site, and flash slider on a commercial painting site. But I want my blog clients to be able to format..then copy/paste code..linke embedding a video. opinions? Thanks John
Web Design | | johnshearer0 -
Multilingual Website. Best SEO Strategy
Hello.
Web Design | | teconsite.com
We have a client that will extend his business to severak countries in Europe.
So far its main market was the Spanish one. In this market it works with his own domain that is the same that its brand name. The domain does not contain any important keyword but it has been working for 11 years: www.efutgol.com. In Spain has a good ranking. It ranks number 1 or number 2, it fluctuates. But it also sells to France and Portugal. In the France market they used a domain with exact match with the French keyword that they are interested in: www.equipementsfootball.com/. The same strategy www.equipamentosfutebol.com in Portugal. Both have number 1 for the main keyword in those Countries for that keyword Now they are going to sell in more countries.
The problem is that each website have a different CMS what makes necessary double maintenance. We are going to unificate in only one domain, one single design, one single CMS all websites. But were have doubts about SEO consequences of doing that What is the best thing for URLs?
www.efutgol.com/fr/ .....
www.efutgol.com/es/
www.efutgol.com / pt What should we do with the domains that are so well positioned in france and portugal? 301 redirect will work? What should we expect? What would you do? What things we should consider to keep the current position?0