Website Migration Query
-
We are going to migrate our site but we cannot do this gradually, so before we complete the whole migration, we were thinking of launching the new site on a sub-domain and gradually redirect traffic to the sub-domain, starting with 10%, moving up steadily so that we then migrate to the new site within four/five weeks.
The new site will have a new URL structure on the same domain, with a complete re-design and the IP address will be changing as well, even though the server geographical location will remain the same.
a) Should we noindex the new sub-domain while the new site is on trial?
b) Are there any other issues we should look out for?
Thanks in Advance
-
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for taking time to help us out as well.
We are checking out your recommendations, especially interesting is learning from Moz's experience.
Kindest Regards
Luciano
-
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for taking time to help us out.
Since you rightly pointed out that forwarding traffic gradually to a “/disallow” sub-domain will hurt us, we were thinking of taking this course:
- Roll out the new site on a /test/ sub-domain with the “disallow” / “no index” instructions
- Invite some visitors (also via geo-targeting) to click on a banner asking them to visit our new site (We will try not to redirect too much traffic to /test/)
- Monitor this limited traffic to weed out any problems and use crawling tools to crawl the website for two weeks, identifying and correcting any errors in the process
- Remove pages from /test/ and push new website “live”
Looking forward to your feedback.
Kindest Regards
Luciano
-
I would echo what Jeff says and take care of the migration all at once, otherwise you're bound to have duplicate issues and create a lot more work for yourself, and possibly cleaning-up to do too.
Migrations can get mega-complex, and thorough preparation is key.
I'd recommend reading this: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
watching Moz's own migration lessons learned Mozinar: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
and checking out Aleyda Solis' actually very useful infographic for migration considerations: http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
Best of luck.
-
Honestly, I don't the the gradual migration to the new site is a very good idea. If you take the route you've outlined, you're likely going to drop in the rankings due to duplicate content issues, or just the fact that you are no-indexing content. Once you no-index content, it can sometimes take quite a while for the content to be re-indexed after you remove the no-index restriction.
I'd instead recommend putting up the new site in a development / test area. If this is one a different subdomain, that's fine for now, but you should no-index / no-follow the test site.
Once everything is ready, flip the switch to have the DNS point to the new IP address for the new site, and then disable the existing site. In order to decrease DNS caching issues, you may wish to set the TTL (time to live) for the A records down to 300 seconds or so.
As your URL stucture is changing, you will want to make sure that the URLS are all 301 redirected to their new location. You can do this with a mod rewrite rule (if everything is changing from .aspx --> .php), or manually map out each page and put them in your .htaccess file.
I would test these out on a site like the http://httpstatus.io/ site to make sure it works properly.
And my recommendation is not to do the changeover on a Friday afternoon, unless you want to spend the whole weekend troubleshooting issues on the site.
Once the site is live, make sure things like the contact forms are working, and that any images on the old site are also moved over if possible (as you might be using them in email campaigns, etc.).
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My website is constantly decreasing
For few weeks ago my website is constantly decreasing in search position. I lost keywords and is gooooing down.
Technical SEO | | Dan_Tala
Although it is well rated on several on page and off page seo verification software that I have tried.
I checked Google search console and Analytics and found no major problems. However… from one day to another it keeps going down.
I also checked what the main competitors are doing and they are not doing well, at all.
The main competitor actually has a creepy website. Totally devoid of onpage or offpage SEO but with an enormous number of backlinks. And of a very bad quality, which should disqualify it, still…
Few weeks ago I changed something.
In the pages I had H1, 4xH2, no H3 and an H4 without content.
An unnatural H tag structure.
Now I have H1, H2, H3, 3xH4, with the coherent information.
Theoretically, Google should have been “happy” or I’m missing something. I use a SAAS platform.
I just found out that they made changes to the keywords (tags).
I am selling toner cartridges for printers.
So…
The tags are printer models and generate a url in which they have the products.
Ex. https://www.sertit.ro/cartus-imprimanta-cilindru-color-hp-laserjet-pro-m-177fw goes to the products for that printer model.
The question is… should I make tag canonical?
Is it possible for products to loose so much in Google search?0 -
Should we reinstate the old website?
In a nut shell we had a great site that performed well and grew month on month but it perhaps looked a bit dated. A decision was taken to build a new site and the job given to a PR agency for some reason. All the titles, H1 tags, page content and url structure was changed and now the site has drop 50% of organic traffic. I've been tasked with trying to rebuild rankings but so far it's not going well. A snapshot of the old website still exists and i'm very tempted to have it reinstated in the hopes that our traffic will recover. What are your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | etienneb0 -
Website crawl error
Hi all, When I try to crawl a website, I got next error message: "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal cookie name" For the moment, I found next explanation: The errors indicate that one of the web servers within the same cookie domain as the server is setting a cookie for your domain with the name "path", as well as another cookie with the name "domain" Does anyone has experience with this problem, knows what it means and knows how to solve it? Thanks in advance! Jens
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
Mobile website indexing
Hi we have a mobile version of our website at mobile.gardening-services-edinburgh.com its been live for 5, maybe 6 months, it has its own mobile-sitemap.xml have tried submitting this sitemap to google and for some reason it does not index these pages any ideas, most welcome
Technical SEO | | McSEO0 -
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
How do I optimize a website for SEO for a client that is using a subdirectory as a seperate website?
We launched a subdirectory site about two months ago for our client. What's happening is searches for the topic covered by the subdirectory are yielding search results for the old site and not the new site. We'd like to change this. Are there best practices for the subdirectory site Specifically we're looking for things we can do using sitemapping and Webmaster tools. Are there other technical things we can do? Thanks you.
Technical SEO | | IVSeoTeam120 -
Duplicate Title - Shopping Website
My website is showing with errors due to duplicate titles, these errors add up to over 150 errors. The problem is a lot of my products are similar, just in different lengths, colors etc. For example
Technical SEO | | adelemaree
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots/48-classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots-blue.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/31-classic-candy-button-short-chocolate.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/28-classic-candy-button-short-black.html How can I avoid this error without having to merge all my products and colors into one page? As that would make my catalogue look too small! Thanks in advance0 -
Spam Backlinks to My Website
today i have created inbound link report using Link Research & Analysis tool and i found that there are number of spam inbound link to my website from lots of blogs and other sites Which anchor text are not relevant to my site. It contain some abusive words in anchor text like "viagra expiration date" and other. I want remove these irrelevant backlinks. As there are very high number of links approx 9000, its almost impossible to remove the links manually. Is there any way to remove and restrict those backlink? Whats steps required to protect any negative affect to my website? Please advice asap.
Technical SEO | | saupari0