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ErSKS / KhCE

Khwopa College of Engineering
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Site Migration SEO Checklist #97

Open ErSKS opened 6 years ago

ErSKS commented 6 years ago
ErSKS commented 6 years ago

Planning the Migration

  1. Create a sitemap of your new site, building a hierarchical list of all your site pages (including images, videos and other assets)
  2. Compile a full list of all the URLs on the current site. This can be done by either crawling the site, extracting from the CMS or exporting URLs receiving traffic from Analytics
  3. Make sure you have a list of the URLs you’re using in PPC campaigns. Failing to set up redirects on these URLs will result in sending users to broken links and trash your Quality Score
  4. Compile a list of all the URLs planned for the new site
  5. Map each individual URL from the current site to new site URLs individually, to be implemented with 301 redirects
  6. Benchmark the current website’s rankings to measure progress throughout the migration. 20 or 30 keywords is not enough – use several hundred as a bare minimum
  7. Benchmark organic traffic levels (including visits, bounce rates, conversions) per page on the current website
  8. Prepare paid ads for keywords that the site ranks well organically for to put live if you run into issues after the site is launched
  9. Identify the most authoritative links in the site’s back-link profile to be switched to the new URLs once the new website is live
  10. Register and configure the new domain in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
  11. Generate an XML Sitemap for the new domain
ErSKS commented 6 years ago

Implementing the Migration

There’s more to “implementation” than waiting for the development team to go live – testing throughout the process is essential.

  1. Prepare and test the 301 redirects at page level for ALL URLs from the old to the new domain. This can be tested using crawlers, rather than done manually
    • Don’t forget subdomains!
  2. Password protect the new domain and block all crawlers in the robots.txt file to prevent the staging site from being indexed. Use meta=”noindex” tags as well if possible. Failure to do so can cause duplication issues as Google will be able to index the content on your staging site as well as live content. Worse, Google could read the content on your staging site before it can read the content in its new home. Nobody wants to rank below their own testing environment
  3. Publish the content to the new domain
  4. Check that all pages exist; show correct information; status codes and all internal links are directed to the correct pages
  5. Disable the authentication/password protection required to access the content on the new website
  6. Implement the 301 redirects at page level from the old to new domain
  7. Verify the redirects are working as expected (again, this can be achieved by crawling the lists of redirects using Screaming Frog SEO Spider)
  8. Remove the disallow rule in the robots.txt file to allow search engines to crawl the new website
    • Steps 5, 6, 7 and 8 need to be executed as quickly as possible to reduce the chances of a search engine being redirected to a blocked site and rankings dropping as a result. Once the redirects are in place the new domain needs to be available to crawl as quickly as possible
  9. Inform Google that the site has moved through the “change of address” option in the old domains account in Google Search Console
  10. In the Webmaster Tools account of the new domain, go to “Crawl” > ”Fetch as Google” and crawl the homepage and main category pages on the new site as Google. As this is done click “submit to index” on each
  11. Submit the sitemap of the new domain to Google via Search Console
  12. Change the URLs in your social sharing buttons so the share counts are carried over to the new website. It’s likely that any SEO benefit you would receive from social shares will be lost, but then it’s unlikely that you actually get any SEO benefit from social shares anyway, so what are you worried about?
  13. Reach out to the site owners of the most valuable links you identified when prepping the site migration. Ask them to change the destination of the links so that they point to the new URLs – this means that when a search engine crawls a linking website and follows an inbound link to your site there is no redirect to interpret, which ensures that the maximum possible amount of PageRank or link equity is passed through the link
ErSKS commented 6 years ago

Monitoring the migration

The sooner you can spot an issue the sooner it can be fixed. Monitoring all your data after a migration is vital for damage limitation.

A hint: if you can monitor 404 errors in your CMS you can fix them before Google is able to find them and list them in Search Console.

  1. Check daily for crawl errors in the Google Search Console account of the new domain for at least the first month after the migration has taken place
  2. Crawl the old URLs as often as possible to ensure 301 redirects are still working (maybe one or twice per week for the first month after the migration will be enough)
  3. Check indexation of both the new and old domains in Search Console (and using a site: search in Google for reference). Indexation of the old website will decrease and then disappear whilst the new will increase (hopefully!)
  4. Check the benchmark rankings to ensure organic visibility is maintained and also that the rankings URLs are what is expected
  5. Monitor organic traffic volumes and behaviour of organic visitors using your analytics platform to ensure the new site is still receiving traffic and users can navigate it without issue
  6. Continue to update external links that go to the old domain if possible. As stated above PageRank will flow through a 301 redirect without issue, but links are more valuable pointing directly to a URL with a 200 response code
  7. Maintain control of the 301 redirects and the old domain at least until it stops being indexed, referring traffic and attracting links.
ErSKS commented 6 years ago

Warning: Need to bear in Mind