Website Redevelopment
A website redevelopment is a large and complex task, migrating content from one website to another, and there are several things that need to be considered from an SEO standpoint. Our SEO Office Hours Notes cover these, along with best practice recommendations from Google to ensure your site redevelopment is successful.
Check out our in-depth website migration checklist for a practical guide on how to manage major site redevelopment projects.
Google Crawl Rate May Take Time to Build for New Websites
Googlebot’s maximum crawl rate is limited to prevent a site slowing down, but Google doesn’t crawl more than it needs to. New websites take take time to build trust to crawl and index new content as quickly as possible.
When Splitting a Category Page Into Two New Ones, Redirect to One of the New URLs & Update Internal Linking
When splitting a category page into two separate pages, John recommends redirecting the old URL to one of the new pages and then updating internal linking normally within your website’s structure.
Back-end Migrations Shouldn’t Cause Problems for Google if HTML & URLs Stay the Same
Migrating your site to a different CMS or platform in the back-end shouldn’t cause any problems for Google, because in these instances the HTML and URLs will stay the same. John recommends staggering this across site sections to monitor any potential performance decreases.
Google Quicker to Understand Pages on Existing Sites Compared to New Sites
It is easier for Google to understand new pages to an existing website compared to new pages on a new site because Google already understands the context of that site on the web.
Splitting or Merging Sites Can Take Months to Stabilise in Search
Splitting out or merging sites can be tricky for Google to understand. It can take time for Google to process these changes and it isn’t possible to predict what the final state might be in terms of rankings and traffic. A site migration may stabilise in search after a week or two and splitting or merging a site could take months to settle down.
Resubmission Requests Can be Sent Via HTTP or HTTPS Version in GSC
When submitting a reconsideration request it doesn’t matter if you do this through the HTTP or HTTPS version in Search Console. However, messages from Google may be sent to either or both versions in Search Console.
Test Changes Before Making Large Scale Changes
When making large scale changes to a site which might impact search, it’s important to first test these changes on a significant sample of pages to see how this impacts search before making changes to all pages.
Make Sure Content is Equivalent for Long Term A/B Testing
Long term A/B testing doesn’t cause any issues for Google as the content is equivalent between what the user and Googlebot see. Short term A/B testing with significant content changes don’t cause issues.
Only Use Submit to Index When Critical to do so
Only use Submit to Index feature in Search Console when it is critical to do so e.g. for a new site that Google hasn’t seen before. Manual submission is not necessary for the addition of new pages as Google can find these through the normal means of crawling a site.
Googlebot Crawls Known URLs Faster Following Significant Site Changes
Googlebot will crawl known URLs faster if it detects that significant changes have been made across the site to things like structured data, rel canonicals or redirects.