Website migration/restyling Seo checklist

[yottacom]

Hello!

This is my personal contribution to the forum: a checklist of activities to do during a migration/restyling of a website.

Why and when do you need this checklist?

Every time you change the URLs of your website! for example:

• You change CMS (eg: from joomla to wordpress)
• You change language technology (from asp to php)
• You decide to change the website url architecture (from "?category=books" to "/category/books")

Everytime you need to change the URL of a resource (aka but not limited to pages), Google (or bing/yahoo/baidoo/yandex) has to "visit your site" (crawl) as it was a new site.

And since google assign "value" to each page (let's call it "pagerank" to simplify), if you change the URL, you are essentially resetting the value to zero.

Now, google is smart and quick and it will eventually rebuild the value of each page, starting from the home page... but it will take time and it won't be the same... and loss of rankings means loss of money/leads/sales/clients.

So this is my checklist of activities: i've done it several times during the years and in many cases the loss of organic visibility was under 5%. It's never flawless, but if you invest time you can prevent ugly situations.

The Masterplan

When the switch from old to new architecture should be done

• Preferably at night, when the disruption of service is less severe
• Preferably planning during a holiday when there are less people online

What to migrate (the "best pages")

Migrating everything could be impossible (it depends on the website size), we should strive for the “best effort” scenario, like:

• Pages with many “inbound” visits (from Google analytics, it doesn't matter the source or medium)
• Best converting landing pages
• Pages with most external links (using Majestic seo or equivalent tool)
• Url indexed on google (the largest sample, the better the results)

The Checklist

• research what are the “best” pages (as written above)
• Mapping the best pages over the new url architecture
• Creating an excel file with the list of redirection
• Creating a proper htaccess which contains the redirections
• Creating customized “404/410 error pages”: it’s important to intercept people who still access the old structure and tell them explicitly that the website has changed. A big friendly “visit the home page” button is the best way to recover these visitors.
• A 410 status code for the old pages is the best way to clean up the domain space in the Google index. “410” means “gone” therefore google will free the space in its index and instead read the new architecture faster. Those pages must have google analytics (or equivalent) installed.
• Check if there are adwords campaigns that need to be changed/stopped: sometimes people forget that the landing pages must be updated/migrated into a new domain
• Check if there are static documents (eg: pdf, doc, xls) that are ranked and need to be migrated on the new structure.
• Check if the web analytics goals need to be updated, since the pageview paths are going to change entirely.

After the migration:

• For a few week, check Google webmaster tool, looking for error pages and evaluate if it’s necessary to add more redirections of simply let the “410” error page to remove them automatically.
• checking using the “site:” command on google (and bing if the market uses it) in order to assess the indexation speed.
• Prepare a new sitemap.xml and load it using google and bing webmaster tool
• Setup a rank check tool to monitor weekly if google is properly changing the relative paths of the ranked terms.
• Setup a weekly report in analytics, showing the amount of error pages generated by the users navigation on the website.

That's it