Preserving SERPs during a New SIte Launch
-
Hi there,
Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to help. You people are stellar.
When launching a new site with concern for preserving the site's organic placement, which attributes or data are the most important to keep consistent from the old site to the new one?
For example, site structure, urls, meta data, image file names, and so on.
Thanks again!
-
Very helpful. Thank you so much Patrick.
-
Hi Leslie
Google actually provides an awesome resource right here to help. I heavily suggest reviewing it with your team.
I would also check out these great guides from Moz called Web Site Migration Guide and Recovering Your Organic Search Traffic from a Web Site Migration Gone Wrong. The latter is more post launch but it will help you think of things before you launch and also help you notice things going wrong after.
All of the above are great resources and will help get you on the right path. I would also suggest not forgetting our friends at Bing - while they may not be a huge portion of your organic traffic, every little bit helps.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have further questions or concerns - good luck!
Patrick -
Hi Leslie,
If I understand the question correctly, you want to preserve indexing of the new site by Google.
One of the ways you can do it is inserting tags "noindex, nofollow" into the HTML source code of all the pages. Also, you can setup the robots.txt files - write there "Disallow: /folder-of-pages-you-don't-want-to-be-indexed".
Hope it helps. Feel free to respond in this thread for any other questions.
Cheers, Martin
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
-
Site Migration
Hi, I have been researching the best way to migrate six sites into one, since I have never done it, and I am frankly overwhelmed. Some resources say to do it incrementally, and a/b test; but I would prefer not to have to do it, as won't it present a disjointed representation for visitors? The previous sites are older and a bit clumsy compared to the new design and functionality in the new site. Can someone please tell me the right way to approach this? Or tell me the best resource for a step-by-step prep, migrate, and watch process? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1230 -
UK and USA site showing up in UK serps for Brand search
Hay Moz Community. I really hope you can shed some light as I am going round in circles. If you do a search in google UK for Oak Furniture Land you will see the two result is www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk and then www.oakfurnitureland.com The problem I have is only the UK site should be showing. Both have hreflang implemented and targeting in search console for UK and USA respectively but it seams that google does not want play ball. Any assistance is greatly appreciated Alex Mxdst
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox60 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
My New(ish) Site Isn't Ranking Well And Recently Fell
I launched my site (jesfamilylaw.com) at the beginning of January. Since then, I've been trying to build high quality back links. I have a few back links with keyword targeted anchor text from some guest posts I've published (maybe 3 or so) and I have otherwise signed up for business directories and industry-specific directories. I have a few social media profiles and some likes on Facebook, both for the company page and some posts. Despite this, I've had a lot of trouble cracking Google's top ten for any term, long or tall tail. I was starting to climb for Evanston Family Law, which is the key term I believe I am best optimized for, but took a dive yesterday. I fell from maybe the 14th result to somewhere on the 4th page. For all my other target terms, I don't know if I've gotten into the 20s yet. To further complicate matters, my Google Places listing isn't showing and is on the second page of results for Places searches, after businesses that aren't located in the same city. The night before I fell, I resubmitted my site to Google because Webmaster tools was showing duplicate title tags when I had none. I had also made a couple changes to some internal links and title tags, but only for a small fraction of the site. Long story short, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I fell in the rankings and why my site isn't competitive for some of my target key phrases. I've read so many horror stories about Penguin that I fear my onsite optimization may be hurting my rankings or my back links are insufficient. I've done plenty of competitor research and the sites that are beating me have very aggressive onsite optimization and few back links. In short, I am very confused. Any help would be immensely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JESFamilyLaw0 -
Redirecting 2 aged site to brand spanking new one
Does 301 redircting 2 aged domain to a new one have a compounding effect? Ive redirected domain #1 to teh new site and my new domain has now jumped to position 6 on Google for the keyword. I have noticed that the sites above me are all aged domains and some with very few backlinks. Number 1 is 4 years old and 20 backlinks, thats it! I am wondering, if I redirected a 11 year old domain that is in the same niche, but never really targeteed that same keyword, would that bump my site even higher? Obviously i am building quality backlinks to the new domain and making sure these are hard to get high quality backlinks. Thanks for your help guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Interesting site migration question.
Hi all. I'm looking for some thoughts on a migrations option we have. At the moment we have two E-Com sites ranking well for some of the same terms. An older site, and a nice new site. The older site is ranking very well for category and product terms, the new one is slowly coming up. Ideally we would like to have one site, the nice new one, and get rid of the old one. If I 301 the old site url's to the new sites will that bring the new site url's into the same position as the old ones? I'm just not sure how this effects sites that are already ranking well. Any ideas are welcomed but I'm really looking for a definitive answer. It's a big decision after all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0