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

The Way People Normally Think about Website Migration
This website is
burning down!

The Way I Think about Website Migration

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

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 guyDeveloper 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 Launch
Post-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

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 Sido
@OmiSido
Brighton SEO 2017
Thank You

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

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