Site Migration – Avoiding Problems

Moving your website can be a scary prospect and there are a minefield of issues you can run into if you do not plan ahead. The aim should be to make the transition as painless as possible for both your users and the search engines and that’s not always easy. Your users should ideally notice no change other than that of your URLs (if your migration included a redesign then things will obviously look different too). The search engines should know that this is a permanent move and pass across any value and quality signals they can.

There are a number of steps you should take before you even consider actually moving anything. They will help you to make sure you have all of your bases covered and that no pages slip through the net, inevitably a few will but you’ll be able to catch them quickly and fix them.

Pages

Get a full list of valid URLs from your current site. You can use a crawling program to do this such as GSiteCrawler or Xenu. I prefer Xenu for this as when you have your list of URLs you can use these to test the redirects of your new site. First you should crawl your site with these settings:

Then click on more options:

You should then export the URL list to a .CSV file and re-import that list back into Xenu using the “Check URL list” option. Set the crawl depth to 0 and uncheck “treat redirects as errors” since the entire list should be redirected and re-run Xenu. If you find any errors then those pages have not been redirected correctly.

Links

You should perform some checks or run some reports to find out the most valuable links that are pointing to your site. This will enable you to contact the webmasters containing those links so you can ask them (politely) to update the link to point to your new domain. This is preferable than relying on 301 redirects as some link value is lost and a simple email could resolve that. If you cannot get the link changed or the webmaster does not respond then a 301 redirect of that page (which you should have done anyway) is the next best thing.

Redirects

Redirects are a crucial part of the site migration process. Ideally your 301 redirection strategy should have been planned out long ago especially if you are changing your URL structure. If you are just changing the TLD of your site (for example .net to .com) you are not facing as many problems.

You should not do a blanket redirect from your old site to your new site. This is where you 301 redirect every page from your old site to the home page of your new site. While this is a sure fire way to avoid any 404 errors it is not ideal from a user point of view and it will also not pass any search value to the relevant pages on the new site. A page-to-page redirect strategy (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is a far better way to go even though it will be more work. Chances are there will not always be a matching page on the new site in which case redirecting to the old page to a new page with similar content is the best option.

If your sites URL structure is changing dramatically then you will need to outline the general URL construction at the varying levels of your site e.g.

/[CATEGORYID]/[PRODUCTID]/?id=[X] should redirect to /[CATEGORY]/[PRODUCT]

Your development team should then be able to go through and construct pattern matched redirects using wildcard values to catch most if not all of your potential 404 errors. The pattern will differ for each level of your site so it is key that you understand your structure at each level.

Testing

It could be advisable to test your migration strategy by moving the contents of one directory first. This will limit the damage if you have made a few slip ups and will allow you to make the necessary changes before moving the rest of your site. When you have moved the test files use a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that these files have been permanently moved.

Once this is completed, check to see that the pages you have moved over are showing on the search results with your new domain (you may have to wait a little while depending on how often your site is crawled).  When you are happy that everything has gone how you planned then you can begin moving over the rest of your files and hopefully will not encounter many issues.