[author: Jamie Granger]
If you’ve ever been part of a website review, you know how complex it can be. When it’s time to transition your website, there’s a lot to think about. It’s easy to focus on the new user experience and engaging content you’ll include, but it’s essential not to forget seo The truth is, when transitioning your website, SEO should be at the forefront of your mind so it doesn’t lose traction.
In a recent episode of Ask Googlebot, google search Attorney John Mueller addressed this concern and provided some guidance. Here’s what legal webmasters need to know about launching a new website while running the old one.
Ensure a smooth transition with redirects
In his video, Mueller advises implementing redirects from the old site to the new one. He states, “Ideally, you would redirect the old website to the new one.” By doing this, you can help users find the right website. Also, and just as important, you’ll be helping search engines transfer any existing signal to the new domain, potentially increasing its position. Redirects pass the value of links pointing to the old domain to the new one. This transfer of link equity is vital for the new website to maintain its search engine rankings. If you switch domains without redirects, you could hurt both the user experience and the search ranking. And of course, it makes things easier for anyone web traffic which might try to visit the website’s old domain as they will be automatically redirected.
To be tactical, the most common and recommended type of redirect is a permanent 301 redirect. This will pass the link equity or ranking power of the existing pages to the new ones. To set them up, start by drawing out which old URLs should point to which new ones. Then, depending on your web server, you can edit your .htaccess file (for Apache) or your server configuration files (for NGINX) to create the redirects. It’s a good idea to get help from a web developer or hosting provider to implement redirects correctly, as this part is very important. He suggests leaving redirects in place for at least a year to ensure a smooth transition for both traffic and search engines. Many content management systems such as WordPress they also have plugins that can automatically create these redirects when migrating to a new site. Again, if you feel uncomfortable with the process, get in touch with an expert, because getting it right is essential to keeping your search rankings intact.
Transition from the old to the new
When starting the process, it’s important to recognize that leaving conflicting information online could confuse users and hurt SEO. Therefore, it is crucial to remove or update the outdated website as soon as possible. Also, having inconsistent information such as different business hours or contact information on both websites will be detrimental as search engines will not know how to index and rank pages with different information. As we mentioned, it’s a good idea to leave the old site active (with redirects in place) for up to a year. During this time, you should do a review to make sure your business information (such as addresses, etc.) is aligned with the new site. When the new site is ready, you should make sure that your old site is no longer publicly visible. You may want to do periodic checks to see how many people are still visiting the old domain so you know when it makes sense to remove the old site entirely.
Take away:
There’s no secret sauce to maintaining search rankings when migrating a site, other than ensuring that information isn’t contradictory and using 301 redirects to point to your new domain. There can be serious consequences for search performance if you don’t understand the migration process properly, so we suggest you consult a website expert who can guide you.
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