Site Migration Questions

[Sika22]

Hello everyone,

We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content.  I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part.  I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic.

One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page.  Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page.  This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply.

My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings.  So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product  if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again.  Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this?  Would a canonical tag be better?  I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied.  Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#.  Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that?

Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch?  I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.

[Sika22]

Andrew thank you for your response.  Our next hurdle is that they are wanting to leave the .net up while the .com is also up.  Two different designs, similar if not the same content on every page.  I'm pushing for internal IP only testing then launch in the middle of the night so we can roll back if there are issues.  I mean with thorough testing there shouldn't be but I know anything is possible.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

Hey Sika22,

I think the first order of business is to let the webmaster/redesign lead know the penalties and risks they face. IMO, your first problem ought to be that of managing expectations; not the technical.

Their insistence to combine a dramatic redesign and adds risk to the SEO, and you simply don't know until launch. Any hit that the website takes ought to be on the manager that's blocking your requests, and not on your shoulders (I prefer email so there's a trail you can refer back to). If you've already done that/unable to—just a thought!

That said, we work we all have our constraints when we work, don't we? And we always do our best. Per your concerns:

• "Instead of having a product page for each product"; I'd try to try to find a way to pitch that they create a "for more info, click here" link on the parallax page. It seems like someone responsible for pushing this redesign is seriously concerned about SEO/keywords (I pull that from your next point about them trying to inject keywords per product name). If that's the case, I'd pitch the product pages like: "Look, if we don't create product pages, we're wasting plenty of great link juice. There's a pretty decent chance we're going to take a hit on every high-ranking landing page we remove. We're removing additional points of discovery into one page with lesser focus."
• "Keywords-for-products"— last I heard, the importance of exact-match url's aren't as useful. You want exact match keywords usage in the content of the page to increase on-page relevancy. Just stuffing the URL isn't going to pull the relevancy up. Whoever is pitching the "let's append keywords to the url" idea ought to see this list of "Moz Search Ranking Factors" (survey). AFAIK, the exact match url isn't a strong enough signal to make it onto this list.

That's what I would do if I were in your shoes. First, set expectations for the changes so that—in case things get worse—you've aired out your worries. Make everyone think twice (and maybe come up with contingencies—it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you flat). Then, keep pitching for the ideas that will you think will help you do your job as an SEO!

Best of luck! — Andrew