There is a great featured thread at WebmasterWorld on the discussion of what details should you keep track of in a changelog when making upgrades and enhancements to your web site? Now, most of you may know that many of the coding changes can be tracked in a versioning system, one of the most well known versioning systems on the web is CVS (Concurrent Versions System), that helps keep track of all changes made to the code on the site. Most development houses use a form of CVS or version tracking.
But I do not believe it tracks everything. Things like domain name host changes, database updates, new links, and so on. So that is why it is important to set up your own methodology to track these changes. You can either do it in an Excel spreadsheet or build out a custom workflow for your employees to work through, to guarantee (or assist) the process of tracking these changes.
So what is recommended to track in the SEO game? Here are some ideas pulled from the WebmasterWorld.
- every change to robots.txt (CVS can handle this)
- every change to htaccess (or Internet Services Manager in IIS)
- site-wide template changes (especially menu changes) (CVS can handle this)
- DNS and hosting changes
- new outbound links
- ad purchases and run-times
- Server updates (especially reboots or outages)
- Config files
- Firewall block list
There are many more ideas of what you should track in the thread.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
