Site migrations: How not to lose your rankings with Jason Mun (TECHIE)

Okay, so it’s time to make big changes to your website. Perhaps you’re moving from one platform to another, or finally changing from HTTP to HTTPS. Perhaps you’re changing your domain name. While, all of this might be great for business, it’s important to understand just how big of an impact a poorly managed site migration … because, yes, that’s what you’re doing, a site migration, can have.

Hello, my name is Kate Toon. I’m the Head Chef here at The Recipe for SEO Success: An online teaching hub of all things related to search engine optimization. I love SEO.

So, I think those big site migrations can teach us smaller site migrations quite a lot. So, great to have you on the show.

Everyone in the SEO industry is talking about it. Just this morning, when I opened up an inbox, I’ve got a flood of notifications saying that we’ve been upgraded, here’s the access to it. That’s been lots of cheddar and really good discussions around the data that’s now available in the new version, or the beta version of Google Search Console. For the listeners, check your inbox, make sure you log in, have a play around with it. It’s a lot of new, good information in there.

Do you want to go for .com, .com, .au. It is an important decision, and one that’s often done rather hastily, as I said at the start.

So, as we said already, I think situations that really warrant migration, and ones that you’re going to have to do are moving from HTTP to HTTPS. It’s like that sticking plaster that needs to be ripped off.

It needs to be done.

What we’re going to do now, just to make it a bit more interesting, is we’re going to do Ping Pong Tips. Jason is going to give a tip, and then I am going to give a tip.

We’re going to talk more about that. I think Tip One is have a plan. Work out what the risks are going to be, work out whose going to be involved, whose doing what, make everyone clear of the consequences are. I think that’s so important. Even if it’s just me, myself and I. Like, you’re a solo business person.

Have a good think about the reasons, the risks, and the steps that you’re going to take. Don’t just suddenly do it one day because you’ve got nothing else to do.

You can download that for free, up to 500 links in your site, so that’s a really great tool. Once you’ve done that, run your site through Screaming Frog. I’ve included a link in the notes.

Make sure that you have a complete list of all the URLs in your site so that nothing gets lost.

Do you have any duplicate content? Any existing re-directs? You’ve already re-directed this page to this page. You can always set up another re-direct because you’ll end up with an obnoxious non-redirect chains.

Look for broken links. You might not find all your links, and all your URLS with Screaming Frog, so you can use other tools like Google Analytics, and Link Explorer from Ahrefs, to help you just get a nice Excel spreadsheet that has every link, every URL in your site. That would be my Tip Number Two.

If you go into the Search Analytics Report under Pages, you can actually export up to 1,000 rows of URLs, or pages, related to your website that Google has indexed, and you’re actually receiving traffic or visibility for.

You might think that your website has 1,000 pages that Google looks at, but if you use that tool, it’s going to unlock thousand and thousands, and rows and rows of data that you can use for your migration.

Most of the sites, or the people listening to this podcast of the people listening to this podcast kind of 100 page mark. So, yes. Great tip, and I will definitely include that in the show notes.

So, I would pull in things like sessions, conversions, revenue, a number of links to help you understand, which are your important URLs that you must migrate properly. This is practically useful, obviously, for larger and bigger websites.

So, make sure you take a benchmark to make sure you know where your current standing is in terms of QR rankings and visibility. SM Rush is a great tool for that. When you do migrate, they have a really nifty daily rankings win/loss report, which will be really useful.

That’s important because if you have a huge site, you might want to … let’s be honest, we should obviously re-direct everything but you want to look at the sites that have the most traffic coming to them, the sites that actually have links pointing at them, the sites … sorry, not the sites, the pages that are really working.

Remember, when you do migrate, you should give the website an upgrade, not a downgrade. In terms of keeping things consistent, I think that’s a really good tip. Keeping metadata consistent, your content consistent, URL structures consistent, just is going to help you in the long run.

Then, they’re like, “Oh, things aren’t working,” and they can’t identify whether it was the migration, or the title tags.

I think it’s good to kind of with Google to kind of do one thing at a time.

It’s a sensitive sausage so we don’t want to upset it. What’s your next tip, Jason?

Okay, my next tip is obviously when you’re doing a site migration, you can set up global re-directs.

If you’re a Web press site, you’re can add them to your HT access file, or whatever. But, that means it’s super tempting to leave all the internal links unchanged. They’re getting re-directed anyway.

If you have links within your site that are absolute links whereas relative links, I think it’s worth going through and fixing those up. It does slow down site performance. It is a re-direct, and thoughts different on re-directs, but I like to draw the analogy of a slightly leaky bucket. Some of that trust, some of authority leaks out with every re-direct that you have.

Once the website is launched, you want to make sure that you give the new website a crawl using Screaming Frog, just to make sure that everything is in order, and there are no crawl errors, no broken links, so on and so forth.

You remember the bunch of URLs that we consolidated together in the spreadsheet?

Now, take that list of URLs and pop in to Screaming Frog and run a crawl off the back of those lists of URLs.

the truth is that no matter how well we do all of this, let’s be honest, there is still always going to be some 404s.

No matter how careful you are, they just creep through. It just seems to happen.

There’s some great blog posts out there on funny and clever 404 pages: 404 pages that actually convert users, or collect data, or even just make you smile, because someone at some point, is going to see a 404 error page. Make sure that it looks as good as it possibly can.

Something, somewhere, will go wrong. Really good tip, having a custom 404 error page would just soften the blow.

Everything should be running smoothly. You want to make sure that the next thing you want to do is regenerate your XML site map, and submit the XML site map to Google Search Console, just to tell Google, “Hey, we’ve got fresh, new pages. Come grab them.”

Remember to go there and update the link to the HTTPS version or the new domain, just so we don’t have Google crawling through those links and going through a re-direct.

Again, all of the bad links that you have pointing to your site, that you’ve built up over the years, they will all re-direct. But, it can be worth reaching out to some of the … I hate that phrase, “reaching out,” I’m so sorry I just used it. It’s most hated marketing phrase.

So, keep a close eye on your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and don’t forget SEM Rush. These three data sources are going to be your best friend in terms of monitoring the performance from an SEO perspective.

But what would you do if suddenly … you’ll have followed all the steps, so this would never happen to you, but if someone has gone through a site migration, and they have really noticed a big difference, where are the first places they should look to fix the problem?

Again, do the usual SEO 101 checks on the website just to make sure that you’ve covered all bases.

But, Google Search Console is going to be your best friend. It’s going to tell you if there’s any errors that you need to fix up, and with the latest version of Google Search Console Beta, it’s going to give you a lot more information and tips and tricks.