Pull meta descriptions from a website that isn't live anymore
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Hi all, we moved a website over to Wordpress 2 months ago. It was using .cfm before, so all of the URLs have changed. We implemented 301 redirects for each page, but we weren't able to copy over any of the meta descriptions.
We have an export file which has all of the old web pages. Is there a tool that would allow us to upload the old pages and extract the meta descriptions so that we can get them onto the new website? We use the Yoast SEO plugin which has a bulk meta descriptions editor, so I'm assuming that the easiest/most effective way would be to find a tool that generates some sort of .csv or excel file that we can just copy and paste? Any feedback/suggestions would be awesome, thanks!
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You can pull the meta descriptions with Screaming Frog from the Wayback Machine if your site is archived. If you want to do this, let me know and I'll help you with the settings.
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I would do it one better and crawl from a local web server, just to be sure. But in all reality, a password protected directory is probably more accessible, in this instance.
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Note Ray-pp suggests you use a private directory... Make sure to keep it out of the serps
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Thanks Ray, we've used the Screaming From Spider for some time now, I've flirted with the idea of re-uploading the web files. This may be our best option, thanks.
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Hi George,
If you can upload the old pages to a private directory, you can then use Screaming Frog SEO tool to crawl all of the pages and retrieve the meta descriptions. That would allow you to easily export much of the on-page SEO, include your meta information.
Screaming Frog SEO spider is a mus have tool for SEOs - check it out if you haven't already!
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