[Build Backlinks Online] Domain Migrations: Surviving the "Perfect Storm" of Site Changes

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Domain Migrations: Surviving the
Perfect Storm of Site Changes'


Posted by Ruth_Burr

Last week, I held a Mozinar talking about the SEO steps involved in
transitioning from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com, and sharing some of the results we
got. We got some great questions on the Mozinar, and I wanted a chance to answer
some more of them as well as expand on some points that didn't fit into the
Mozinar.




Throwing Best Practices to the Wind

As we spent more than a year planning the transition from SEOmoz to Moz, one
thing I wanted to make sure everyone knew internally was that we were engaging
in â well, maybe not worst practices, but we were pretty far away from
best practices when it came to domain migration.


One thing most SEOs will tell you about domain migration is that you
shouldnât make a lot of big changes at once. For example, if youâre
switching to a new domain, just switch domains; donât try to change
anything else at the same time. If youâre refreshing your design, just do
that; donât try to change your content or URL structure at the same time.
And definitely, definitely donât change anything else if youâre
changing your top-level domain (TLD).




Screenshot from "Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration - The Infographic"
by Aleyda Solis


Avoiding making this many changes to your website at once will mean that
search engines have a much easier time finding, crawling, and ranking your new
site, and that youâre much better positioned to diagnose problems as they
arise.


Nevertheless, there we were: plotting a massive re-brand, site redesign,
content overhaul, and domain change â complete with TLD switch â all
at the same time. A perfect storm. Itâs enough to make a person lose sleep
(I know I did). At the same time, Iâm glad we went through this, because
itâs exactly the kind of thing some of you are going to end up dealing
with as well. We needed to make all of these changes simultaneously in order to
do what we wanted to do with the new product and re-brand, and that took
precedence over SEO best practices. Instead of throwing up my hands and saying
âwell, weâre doomed,â I had to learn to do as much as I could
with the situation at hand.

Doing the Long, Boring, Hard Work

The major portion of my work preparing for the domain migration was my big
giant list of URLs:




Casey helped me pull a list of every URL on the site from our database, and I
found each URL a redirect target on Moz.com. I would recommend pulling your URL
list from your own database or server logs if itâs at all possible; it
will give you a much more complete list of URLs than simply running a crawl
using a program like Xenu or Screaming Frog.


When I talk to people about the migration, they typically blanch at the big
giant list of URLs. Is it really necessary to look at every URL on the site?


Well, no, not totally. In our case, there were large sections of the site
(like the blog and Q&A) that were staying largely the same â we could just
redirect everything at seomoz.org/blog/* to moz.com/blog/* without needing
further detail. For sites that are simply changing from one domain to another
without a major redesign/restructure (which, again, you should really do if you
can), it becomes even easier: If your siteâs staying exactly the same, you
can just redirect everything to the same folder location on your new domain.


Iâm so glad that I did go through every page on the site, though, since
I was able to get rid of a lot of old orphan pages, and help make sure the new
site taxonomy was more inclusive so we didnât have new orphan pages going
forward. A site migration is a great time to 301 old pages that have outlived
their usefulness to newer, more useful resources.

Traffic and Ranking Loss

I canât stress enough how important it is to manage expectations around
traffic and ranking loss during a domain migration. In the Mozinar, I mentioned
that some PageRank is lost through 301 redirects (thanks Ethan for sending along
this video from Matt Cutts explaining that the amount of PageRank that
dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount that dissipates
through a link). This is usually not a huge deal for your most popular,
best-linked pages, but can be an issue for deep pages that rank for long-tail
terms, especially if the external links pointing to those pages are old or there
arenât very many of them.


With the Moz migration, the site restructure meant that we changed the
internal link juice flowing from page to page as well. In some cases that was
beneficial, such as with our Learn section which gained importance as it moved
from our footer to our (now-reduced) header. In other cases, however, it meant
some pages losing internal link equity. Again, not a huge issue for the most
important pages but definitely impactful on long-tail terms. Between those two
factors, the chance that our traffic and rankings wouldnât be affected was
pretty slim â and they were.

Better User Engagement

The flip side to the traffic loss was that we saw a boost in engagement
metrics. Cyrus ran a quick study on a subgroup of users who a) had arrived
through non-branded organic search and b) were new visitors to the site, to
mitigate as much as possible the influences of preconceived expectations and
industry âbuzzâ surrounding the re-brand. Hereâs what he
found:




As you can see, nearly every section on the site saw a boost in pageviews and
pages per visit, as well as a huge decrease in bounce rate. The only downside is
that we did see a decrease in time on page, pretty much across the board. We
have a few theories on that: It could be that the more people click around the
site, the less qualified each page view becomes; or it could be that the
redesign has, in many cases, made pages shorter and easier to read quickly. The
fact that time on page has decreased while average visit duration and bounce
rate have improved points to the lowered time on page not being an indicator of
lower quality, so thatâs good.

What About Changing Platforms?

I didnât get much of a chance to discuss changing CMS/Platforms in the
Mozinar, because we run the site on a custom back end and CMS. Itâs a
question we get a lot in Q&A, so I wanted to address it.


Like most domain migrations, itâs important to keep things as much
âthe sameâ as possible when migrating to a new platform or CMS.
Ideally, your site would look pretty much the same to users before and after the
change â you could start making improvements using your brand new shiny
CMS after the migration takes place. One thing thatâs especially important
to avoid when changing platforms or CMS is to make sure the new back end
isnât appending extra things to your URLs. For example, you want to make
sure your home page is still www.example.com and hasnât switched to
www.example.com/index or the like. Also be on the lookout for extensions such as
.html or .aspx being appended to your old URLs by the new platform. Thatâs
a really common cause of duplicate content on a new platform.

Sitemaps

In the Mozinar, I mentioned that we had multiple sitemaps in Google Webmaster
Tools, and got a question about why we do it that way. Since thatâs a
decision that was implemented before I came on, I wanted to make sure I had the
whole answer before I responded, but it was as I suspected. We have separate
sitemaps for our blog, Community profiles and YouMoz because those are three of
the largest areas of our site. Since each sitemap can only contain 50,000 URLs,
this multiple-map experience ensures we have plenty of room in each one for
these prolific sections to keep growing. Kate Morris wrote a great post on using
multiple sitemaps a couple years ago; you can read it here.

Noise in the Signal

âThis is great info, Ruth,â I can hear you saying, âbut why
did it take you a month to share it with us?â A lot of the reason has to
do with noise in the signal.


In the days surrounding the launch, we had increased buzz from our PR efforts
and excitement from our customers about the new site. We knew this would happen
â and were happy about it! â and that this uptick wasnât a
good indicator of how the new site would perform in the long term.




I also wanted to wait until SEOmoz pages were no longer ranking (as I
mentioned in the Mozinar, theyâre still indexed but arenât ranking
for any of our target terms) and had been replaced with Moz.com URLs, to get a
better sense of how our rankings were impacted before I shared the info. This
kind of longer-term analysis is important in the wake of a migration; make sure
youâre getting as accurate a picture as possible of your new metrics.


Thanks again to everyone who listened in on the Mozinar, and who sent your
kind wishes and congratulations to the Moz team during this process. It was a
huge effort by the whole company and weâre so happy to share it with you!

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