Site redesign what to consider to avoid any issues
-
Hi GUYS
I want to avoid getting myself into a bad situation with google, so I'm just wanting to know if there are any steps I would need to take whilst I'm redesigning and developing my site as I'm currently deploying our new designs.
One thing I noticed, i have my new designs and content on our development server to run through any checks before deploying it to the live environment, however while our live site is up, I have duplicate content on the live site that exactly matches the dev site for obvious reasons but do I need to tell google that the dev site is for development purposes only so google knows I'm not duplicating content?
I have searched around to find some more info about this, if anyone has some insight i would be glad to know your thoughts.
Thank you in advance
-
What I usually do is set the website up on a staging area set up at example.com and modify my local host file with the ip address of the staging area with domain and access the site via example.com
-
Glad to help, Justin. Also, remember when you go live with the site to take the development site offline or secure it in a way where regular web traffic can't get to it. Otherwise you risk visitor confusion.
-
Hi Justin,
This time also I'm sharing an article on this because there are several checkpoints . Please check below article
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/
Hope this helps.
thanks
-
wow, thanks so much guys! I definitely needed a step by step guide to give my developer! Once these have been done, how would I go about checking and making sure that its all been done correctly by my developer?
-
Hi Justin,
IMO first you need to noindex to your test site (new design site) .Please add following code in header of every page
It's important to know that
User-agent: *
Disallow: /is to block the site in the Robots.txt file is not sufficient. The meta-tags are the important part. If you skip those and only use robots.txt your site could still end up being crawled.
You are looking for step by step Guide so I'm sharing two very informative articles in case of redesign website for SEO purpose
1>http://moz.com/blog/how-to-avoid-an-seo-disaster-when-changing-your-website
Hope it helps you.
Thanks
-
Perfect! Thanks so much Vic Marcus!
-
When we went through a similar process for our company last year, we set up a development site under a sub-domain and no-indexed all the pages under it. That prevented any duplicate content issues for us. Once going live, we allowed indexing and following of certain pages.
Another way to do it is to edit your robots.txt and disallow all access to the development site.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
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
-
G.A. question - removing a specific page's data from total site's results?
I hope I can explain this clearly, hang in there! One of the clients of the law firm I work for does some SEO work for the firm and one thing he has been doing is googling a certain keyword over and over again to trick google's auto fill into using that keyword. When he runs his program he generates around 500 hits to one of our attorney's bio pages. This happens once or twice a week, and since I don't consider them real organic traffic it has been really messing up my GA reports. Is there a way to block that landing page from my overall reports? Or is there a better way to deal with the skewed data? Any help or advice is appreciated, I am still so new to SEO I feel like a lot of my questions are obvious, but please go easy on me!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Merging Sites - consolidation of your my web sites
I have had 3 tourism web sites for many years (each site represents a different place in Costa Rica) and they cross link with each other. www.monteverdetours.com is the main site - the most important one. In order to help ranking and to comply with all the new google changes.... I have recently been advised that (page by page, I should incorporate the other site, www, arenalvolcanotours.com into the monteverde site with 301s, In other words there will be a new directory on monteverde called /arenal-volcano-tours which will be the new home page for the arenal section. So page by page I can map the old URL's to the new URL's eg arenalvolcanotours.com/arenal-hotels-economy.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero
301 redirect to
monteverdetours.com/arenal-volcano-tours/arenal-hotels-economy.html Now my monteverde site was once penalized by google and I am worried that doing this might have an adverse effect (although the thinking behind doing this change is because google prefers it to all the cross linking and also I will be able to consolidate all the links from Arenal into Monteverde). I respect the person who made the suggestion but I was interested in opinions from other people! I want to be positive this is a good ideas before undertaking this major work! Any opinions would be appreciated!0 -
How to gain links to this site
Hello, How would you suggest I gain backlinks for bobweikel.com in light of all present and future Google updates? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How will Google deal with the crosslinks for my multiple domain site
Hi, I can't find any good answer to this question so I thought, why not ask Moz.com ;-)! I have a site, let's call it webshop.xx For a few languages/markets, Deutsch, Dutch & Belgian, English, French. I use a different TLD with a different IP for each of these languages, so I'll end up with: webshop.de, webshop.nl, webshop.be, webshop.co.uk, webshop.com & webshop.fr They all link to eachother and every subpage that is translated from the other site gets a link as well from the other languages, so: webshop.com/stuff links to webshop.de/stuff My main website, webshop.com gets links from every other of these domain which Open Site Explorer as well as Majestic SEO sees as an external link. (this is happening) My question. How will Google deal in the long-run with the crosslinks coming from these domains? some guesses I made: I get full external links juice (content is translated so unique?) I get a bit of the juice of an external link They are actually seen as internal links I'll get a penalty Thanks in advance guys!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pimarketing0 -
Site review
Can any one give me a quick site review, recently started work for the company on the seo, just want to asking if I am missing anything that may hinder SEO and SERPs etc www.teamac.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
Beaten in SERP's by a site going 'all in' on 2 keywords in their anchor text profile.
I would like to get peoples thoughts on putting 80% of your anchor text links in just 2 keywords vs a nice spread of branded and longtail keywords.. like I am. recently fell off the first page for a key SERP.. and the site in P10 has gone nuts on just that two keyword's.. I know we have a good site onpage/ conversion / low bounce rate page views etc.. Pretty sure we get more traffic than them. Seems that this obvious bloated anchor text profiling has worked for them though.. What do you guys think/know?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
How much pain can I expect if I change the URL structure of the site again?
About 3 months ago I implemented a massive URL structure change by 'upgrading' some of the features of our CMS Prior to this URL's for catergorys and products looked something like this http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=OX09 I made a few changes but din't implement it fully as I felt it would be better to do it instages as the site was getting indexed more thouroughly. HOWEVER... We have just hit the first page for some key SERP's and I am wary to rock the boat again by changing the URL structures again and all the sitemaps. How much pain do you think we could feel if i went ahead and optimised the URL's fully? and What would you do? 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
What does Youtube Consider Duplicate content and will it effect my ranking/traffic?
What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0