omi sido-beyond-the-basics-of-website-migration.pptx

Omi Sido@OmiSido

Beyond the basics of website migration

www.youtube.com/omisido

Beyond the Basics of Website Migration @OmiSido #BrightonSEO

www.youtube.com/omisido

The Way People Normally Think about Website Migration

This website is burning down!

@OmiSido #BrightonSEO

The Way I Think about Website Migration


Website migration is your best opportunity to significantly improve your SEO in one go.

Beyond the Basics of Website Migration



Website migration is your best chance to educate your SEO team on all aspects of SEO.



Website migration is also your best chance to show other departments what SEO is.


You need a (Cross-Functional) migration team.

The SEO guy Developer Content


Website Migration - Clear Overview

•SEO migration plan (checklist). •Content migration plan.•Development. •Timelines.

First, you need a plan. As you gonna be in charge of this plan you should have 4 sections.


Website Migration - Clear Overview

For an e-commerce store - is 2 months before Christmas the best time to migrate your website?

Consider when the migration will take place.


The SEO Plan

Pre-Migration LaunchPost-Launch Diagnostics and Monitoring


The SEO plan - Pre-Migration

The more time you spent on your pre-migration stage, the more you increase your chances of a successful migration.



99% of the SEO checks you do when in pre-migration stage should be done at least once on a monthly basis even when not migrating your website.



Know your website before migrating it to a new platform.


The SEO plan - Pre-Migration Full Crawl


Pre-Migration - Orphan pages

23 % are bringing only 3% or organic visits. Is it worth keeping them?


Pre-Migration - 404 pages

404 pages - if no inbound links are pointing at them please discard.


Pre-Migration - Things to pay attention to

Check and benchmark your rankings! Rankings will almost certainly fluctuate after you transfer a website and it’s common for rankings to decrease, so having a before and after record of ranking positions is invaluable.


Pre-Migration - Content

90% of the cases, there is a content migration running in parallel.

Can you make similar pages more succinct by combining them into a single asset? Are there opportunities for improvement?


Pre-Migration - Staging Environment

Prevent search engines from indexing your dev site!

• Requesting search engines ignore your site by adding it to your robots.txt file

• Adding a noindex meta tag to the site

• Password protecting the site

• Only allowing access to certain IP addresses

The way to do it (in order from least to most desirable methods).


Pre-Migration - Staging

“Important! For the noindex meta tag to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex tag, and the page can still appear in search results, for example, if other pages link to it.” - Google


Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping

301 mapping of old URL’s to their equivalent is the most important task to get right during a website migration. Period.


Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404) The best time to clean up your product offering.

301

301

301

301

No Yes

301

Soft 404

Soft 404

Soft 404


Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404) Migrating from www.Royal.gov.uk to www.royal.uk


Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping - Chains Redirects

Page A Page B Page C301

301

Page A and Page B exist on the old website.Page A redirects to Page B.Page C is the equivalent page on the new website.Page A should redirect directly to Page C as should Page B, rather than Page A redirecting to Page B which then redirects to Page C.

301


Pre-Migration - Tracking

Ensure tracking code is included on all ‘new’ pages.Double, triple check on this one. To check all your pages on staging use https://www.becontentking.com

https://www.becontentking.com/


Website Migration - Press The Button


Website Migration - Immediate Post-Migration Actions • Check GA tracking is implemented and collecting data on all pages.

• Check that all redirects are working properly and 301 Moved Permanently• Crawl URLs from the old site to check 301 redirects match up as expected.• Check robots.txt is up-to-date• If the domain has changed, notify search engines. • ‘Fetch as Google’ in Google Search Console and ‘Submit URLs’ in Bing Webmaster Tools. • Run a crawl of the new website and check for errors.• Keep existing XML sitemaps online for at least 2-3 weeks. • Compare the load speed of top 1 000 key pages from old website.

Omi [email protected]/omisidoBrighton SEO 2017

Thank You

http://www.youtube.com/omisido

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