Post on 21-Apr-2017
transcript
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!
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The Way I Think about Website Migration
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Website migration is your best opportunity to significantly improve your SEO in one go.
Beyond the Basics of Website Migration
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Beyond the Basics of Website Migration
Website migration is your best chance to educate your SEO team on all aspects of SEO.
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Beyond the Basics of Website Migration
Website migration is also your best chance to show other departments what SEO is.
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You need a (Cross-Functional) migration team.
The SEO guy Developer Content
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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.
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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.
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The SEO Plan
Pre-Migration LaunchPost-Launch Diagnostics and Monitoring
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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.
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The SEO plan - Pre-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.
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The SEO plan - Pre-Migration
Know your website before migrating it to a new platform.
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The SEO plan - Pre-Migration Full Crawl
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Pre-Migration - Orphan pages
23 % are bringing only 3% or organic visits. Is it worth keeping them?
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Pre-Migration - 404 pages
404 pages - if no inbound links are pointing at them please discard.
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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.
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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?
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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).
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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
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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.
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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
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Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404) Migrating from www.Royal.gov.uk to www.royal.uk
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Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404) Migrating from www.Royal.gov.uk to www.royal.uk
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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
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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
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Website Migration - Press The Button
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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.