What is Migration
Understanding Website Migration
If your looking for a new website there are important factors to consider. Every website will go though growth, updates, and redesigns to keep up with consumer demands and expectations. A website migration is anytime there is a significant change to your website. When these changes occur you want to ensure you not losing your current keyword positions and search engine rankings.
There are many factors to take into consideration when making changes to a website. Here are some factors that classify as common website migrations. It is important to take the proper steps or have the right company on your side with the knowledge and skills to properly perform the process, saving you aggravation, rankings loss, and money.
Website Redesign: Changing the design leads to adding, changing, or removing pages including services and products.
Merging Pages: Pages of the same topic will cannibalize each other as search engines may consider them to be duplicates. It's better to merge for a stronger page performance.
URL Changes:
Fixing, replacing, or simply shortening URL's for better search engine eligibility including adding or removing the www. prefix from the URL.
HTTP / HTTPS Change: Securing your website connection creates URL changes on every page throughout the website.
Domain Name Changes: Changing to a new domain name leaves your current SEO in the dark without proper redirects and canonical tags.
Domain Name Changes: Changing to a new domain name leaves your current SEO in the dark without proper redirects and canonical tags.
Rankings Start To Drop
Start by verifying your rankings actually dropped. Often times there are other external issues that may appear to be rankings dropped when in fact it's nothing more than an program miscalculation.
Begin by checking with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools. Before taking any additional steps it's better to wait a day to re-verify and research any Google updates that may be causing some indexing issues or overall ranking changes.
Once you've established your website rankings are suffering a negative impact caused by a migration you should begin by examining you on-page SEO checking if pages may have been inadvertently set for no index, any URL errors, and improper 301 redirects. Other factors to look for include slow loading times, outdated sitemap, and spam score.
Common Factors Include:
- Site Speed
- Internal Linking
- canonical strategy
- New page creation
- Crawl Errors
- Keyword Stuffing
- Duplicate Content
- Content to HTML Ratio
- Spam Score
- Outdated Sitemap
- Schema / Structured Data
With so many variables involved even among the most seasoned experts there are no guarantees that you won't lose some rankings during a website migration, even if only temporarily. It's recommended to take additional steps regardless of migration results through social media announcements, promotions, and email marketing to get the word out of the newly designed or added website features.
Suffering From
A Failed Migration
If you are experiencing a loss of backlinks and search engine rankings due to missteps in a website migration by a company hired, time is of the essence. Once the old website is taken down or updated without taken preventative steps it is already more difficult to reclaim lost backlinks and rankings. However, through immediate research some lost URL's can still be recovered and redirected. The longer the wait the more of an exact path is required to locate lost URL's and links, and over time virtually impossible. Get started today!
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Trijour Media Design takes pride that we're locally owned Kansas City, MO. web design company. We're building responsive website designs for Kansas City, St. Louis, all of Missouri, and across this great nation. As an SEO company we are dedicated in building your search engine rankings through on-site and of-site search engine optimization. Keeping our online services in-house saves time and money.