Too many times we see companies launching new site designs, cms systems or versions of their websites without factoring the correct migration strategy. After launch, the organic traffic often dries up very quickly due to an incorrect migration strategy. This is when the red flag goes up, and people wonder what happened to their valuable traffic.
When web developers start coding the new site, they will launch on a development URL such as http://clientsite.webdesigncompany.com and this will be sent to clients for feedback and progress. Once the clients are 100% happy that the new site is “good to go”, they sign off and instruct the web design/development company to launch their new site. Many development companies make some common SEO mistakes that will most likely result in problems when the site goes live.
I have highlighted a few problems and solutions that you can implement to avoid this happening to your site.
Problem 1: Duplicate Content Penalty
The demo link contains the new design with new populated content. Google has ways and means of self discovering new websites; one way is through the Google Toolbar. It sends a request to the spiders and within a few days your entire development site is fully indexed in Google.
Why is this problem happening? The development site contains new content and if Google discovers this first on the development link and on not on your live URL, you run the risk of launching the site, which is seen in Google’s eye as a duplicate (as the development site was indexed first).
In this scenario, don’t expect to get reward for your content; rather you will receive a punishment in the form of no rankings for those duplicated pages.
Solution:
Make sure that the developers implement the following in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This command tells Google’s spiders NOT to index the development site and it should always be implemented as a rule of thumb.
Problem 2 : Removing or changing URL structure
When launching a new site, you will most probably change the URL, this can be due to the following:
• Site Navigation changing
• Site Architecture changing
• SEO restructuring : index.php?id=88 to /keyword-keyword/
If you analyse the traffic of a site down to each URL you will notice that the majority of the traffic will go to sub-pages that are not the homepage. These pages have been established for years in the search.
The new site launches and these pages are either no longer active or they the URL has been renamed. As a result Google (and your visitors) find a page that no longer exists. Two common things can happen now:
1. Google receives a 404 (page not found error) . Google does not like finding these. After time it keeps knocking on your door and if no one is home, it eventually gives up
2. You redirect ALL legacy pages back to your home page. The issue with this is that the pagerank and rankings for the specific page will most likely not be salvaged.
Solution:
Scan analytics and see which pages or sections of the site receive the most traffic. If you find a section that sells “green widgets” and it used to have the following URL: index.php?id=88 , but now you have changed the URL to /green-widgets/. You need to add a 301 redirect from index.php?id=88 to /green-widgets/. Other low priority pages can be 301 redirected back to the homepage. It’s important to retain the redirection from old category name to new category name and not the homepage for traffic retention.
We will apply the above based on traffic. We also will have a record of the all the old URL’s of the site. These will all need to be 301 redirected as well. Just to make sure we haven’t missed anything, we also scan Google’s index and Webmaster tools to make sure a link has not slipped through the cracks.
Problem 3: IBL (Inbound links)
In Problem 2 we discussed 301 redirecting a high ranking page from an old location to a new location. Certain established pages in sites often have inbound links from external sites. These links are part of the reason that these pages rank so highly and are responsible for substantial traffic.
By 301 redirecting a page you fix one part of the problem. The issue is that if you redirect an old page that has dozens of external links point to it, the new location will not have 100% of the “vote”. Recently Google confirmed that 301 redirects result on a pagerank loss.
Solution:
Find out which sites link to the old page and notify and request them to change the link to the new location. This can be challenging and time consuming, but well worth the fight.
Additional Points:
We also advise updating your sitemap.xml file at Google’s Webmastertools. You should also be pedantic and monitor your traffic, and notifications such as slow loading pages or broken links. Webmastertools can be a valuable source of information.
Conclusion:
It goes without saying; the new site should be fully optimised according to our stringent 85 point checklist. The above 3 problems represent some potential hurdles that can often be overlooked which result in lost rankings. If you are about to re-launch your website, we recommend contacting R.O.I Media for a full site migration strategy and implementation.
