Below is live coverage of the SEO Essentials For Migrating Websites panel from the SMX West conference. This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick.
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Barry Schwartz:
10:40:36 am
Starting in 5 minutes
Barry Schwartz:
10:41:06 am
Barry Schwartz:
10:41:12 am
That is the face of a Mac user using a PC
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SEO Essentials For Migrating Websites (#smx #32A)
It’s an SEO’s worst nightmare: for whatever reason, you need to migrate your website to a new host, CMS, or (horror!) a new domain name. But don’t panic – there are proven techniques that can help minimize the impact on search visibility caused by a site migration. Panelists on this session share best practices and tactics to ensure all of your hard-fought SEO efforts aren’t for naught.
Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance (@keyrelevance)
Q&A Moderator: Corey Morris, SEO Strategist, emfluence (@coreydmorris)
Speakers:
Jessica Bowman, CEO, SEOinhouse.com
Rhea Drysdale, Co-Founder & CEO, Outspoken Media, Inc. (@Rhea)
Ryan Jones, Sr. SEO Strategist, Team Detroit (@ryanjones)
Dana Lookadoo, SEO Consultant and Trainer, Yo! Yo! SEO (@lookadoo)
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive (@sharithurow)
It’s an SEO’s worst nightmare: for whatever reason, you need to migrate your website to a new host, CMS, or (horror!) a new domain name. But don’t panic – there are proven techniques that can help minimize the impact on search visibility caused by a site migration. Panelists on this session share best practices and tactics to ensure all of your hard-fought SEO efforts aren’t for naught.
Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance (@keyrelevance)
Q&A Moderator: Corey Morris, SEO Strategist, emfluence (@coreydmorris)
Speakers:
Jessica Bowman, CEO, SEOinhouse.com
Rhea Drysdale, Co-Founder & CEO, Outspoken Media, Inc. (@Rhea)
Ryan Jones, Sr. SEO Strategist, Team Detroit (@ryanjones)
Dana Lookadoo, SEO Consultant and Trainer, Yo! Yo! SEO (@lookadoo)
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive (@sharithurow)
Barry Schwartz:
10:41:31 am
We cannot blog Shari's presentation
Barry Schwartz:
10:45:42 am
Site Migration panel starting now
Barry Schwartz:
10:46:00 am
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10:46:05 am
Dana Lookadoo, SEO Consultant and Trainer, Yo! Yo! SEO (@lookadoo) is up first
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10:46:24 am
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Every web site that is migrated, will experience little loss
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10:47:10 am
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10:48:09 am
She shares the experience some people have with migrating 10+ year old sites that are half broken
Barry Schwartz:
10:48:13 am
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10:48:54 am
Barry Schwartz:
10:49:14 am
That is the plan right there. Lisa is on my right trying to type the whole slide fast. :)
Barry Schwartz:
10:49:47 am
Migration Variables depend on what changes:
- Design?
- URLs?
- IA Structure?
- Content & Meta?
- Plugins and Functionality?
- Design?
- URLs?
- IA Structure?
- Content & Meta?
- Plugins and Functionality?
Barry Schwartz:
10:50:26 am
Mirror the content order, keep the home page links, retain the link structure as much as possible
Barry Schwartz:
10:51:03 am
You want to know your internal links, you want to maintain your internal link structure, persrve your internal link strcuture
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10:51:36 am
Know your top pages, which tools have the most links, which pages get the most traffic. Use Webmaster Tools or Open Site Explorer to discover those links
Barry Schwartz:
10:52:25 am
Weekly Baseline Metrics include pages indexed, cache date, PageRank, home page authority, domain authority and webmaster tools errors
Barry Schwartz:
10:52:54 am
Then think about tracking monthly basis, traffic sources, key pages, unique visitors, page/visits, bounce rates, time on site, conversions, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
10:53:21 am
Now the Planning and Implementation ....
Barry Schwartz:
10:53:50 am
First disallow your development site from being indexed using robots.txt file and password protect your dev site
Barry Schwartz:
10:54:08 am
Content Audit, what type of content do you have, rate the pages, what is moving, what pages are already indexed.
Barry Schwartz:
10:54:37 am
You can use the IIS SEO Toolkit to do an audit
Barry Schwartz:
10:55:19 am
Now the keyword research phase... map those keywords properly
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10:55:32 am
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10:55:57 am
When you set up your redirects, map the redirects one to one. Retain the site hierarchy and structure
Barry Schwartz:
10:56:56 am
Final Days prior to launch:
- Try to break the site
- New Domain? Keep both active
- 503
- Mail Servers
- Secure access, etc.
- Try to break the site
- New Domain? Keep both active
- 503
- Mail Servers
- Secure access, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
10:57:09 am
Now you launch. Expect a drop in rankings from 2-4 weeks
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10:57:53 am
Post Launch:
- Remove the robots.txt disallow
- Update/submit XML sitemap
- If a new domain, add and verify your site in GWT
- Fill out change of address
- Check header coders
- Keep track of coding errors
- Watch 404s
- Check indexation
- Remove the robots.txt disallow
- Update/submit XML sitemap
- If a new domain, add and verify your site in GWT
- Fill out change of address
- Check header coders
- Keep track of coding errors
- Watch 404s
- Check indexation
Barry Schwartz:
10:58:44 am
Next up Jessica Bowman, CEO, SEOinhouse.com
Barry Schwartz:
10:59:35 am
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11:00:10 am
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11:00:37 am
She is going to look at two of those phases
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11:00:42 am
REQUIREMENTS
Barry Schwartz:
11:01:41 am
You must atttend all requirement meetings
Barry Schwartz:
11:02:22 am
You need to read the new site migration documentation from the developers
Barry Schwartz:
11:03:42 am
She shows an example of something written in a technical document that was bad for SEO
Barry Schwartz:
11:03:56 am
It was a business decision, but it would create huge duplicate content issues
Barry Schwartz:
11:05:29 am
Here is a snippet of those requirements
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11:05:34 am
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11:06:35 am
You need to sit down with the design team before they do their photoshop work
Barry Schwartz:
11:07:16 am
Get designers and SEOs to review the wire frames prior to the developers see it
Barry Schwartz:
11:07:24 am
Most wire frames only cover basic SEO stuff
Barry Schwartz:
11:07:56 am
The wire frames may say "make this SEO friendly" but it should specifically say how
Barry Schwartz:
11:08:29 am
Learning happens over time, so train your team, the more they will learn
Barry Schwartz:
11:09:55 am
Rhea Drysdale, Co-Founder & CEO, Outspoken Media, Inc. (@Rhea) is next up
Barry Schwartz:
11:10:00 am
She is way cooler than Lisa
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11:10:12 am
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She is going to focus on links for migration
Barry Schwartz:
11:11:12 am
She likes Bing Webmaster Center cause it has very detail error reporting
Barry Schwartz:
11:11:55 am
Bing shows you link detail with the anchor text.
Barry Schwartz:
11:12:12 am
Google Webmaster Tools also lets you do this... Shows you most linked to content.
Barry Schwartz:
11:12:28 am
So reach out to them and ask them to link to the new place
Barry Schwartz:
11:12:43 am
You can download all those reports
Barry Schwartz:
11:12:52 am
There is also Open Site Explorer
Barry Schwartz:
11:12:56 am
Also Majestic SEO
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Google Analytics shows referral traffic
Barry Schwartz:
11:13:23 am
404 Discovery, check to see which pages are broken or need to be 301ed
Barry Schwartz:
11:13:46 am
You can control domains you own, self published links, sites with a direct relationship and paid links
Barry Schwartz:
11:15:04 am
What don't you control? Really old content, curated lists, reviews, news/media mentions, site wide links, blogrolls, andd social shares
Barry Schwartz:
11:15:37 am
Set up a criteria on what is a priority:
- Link count
- Followed or no followed
- Anchor Text
- Domain and page authority
- Link count
- Followed or no followed
- Anchor Text
- Domain and page authority
Barry Schwartz:
11:16:33 am
Now you need to automate and outsource to ge tthem updated.... Use something like mechanical turk or odesk
Barry Schwartz:
11:16:46 am
Raven SEO tools and Buzz Stream has a contact discovery but it is a bit buggy
Barry Schwartz:
11:17:26 am
Once you have the list of people to contact, you need to reach out to those people. Make sure new link still adds value. Otherwise why would they update a link?
Barry Schwartz:
11:17:54 am
After, track and follow up with these people
Barry Schwartz:
11:19:45 am
Then replace the links you cant fix
Barry Schwartz:
11:20:07 am
Ryan Jones, Sr. SEO Strategist, Team Detroit (@ryanjones) is next
Barry Schwartz:
11:20:22 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:20:50 am
He had to change his deck last minute b/c he just switched companies --- He also bribed me with non-Kosher cookies
Barry Schwartz:
11:22:12 am
Reasons To Move A Domain:
- A change in brand identity
- You might get a Google penalty
- Maybe you just screwed up
- Maybe you need to consolidate and leverage your authority
- A change in brand identity
- You might get a Google penalty
- Maybe you just screwed up
- Maybe you need to consolidate and leverage your authority
Barry Schwartz:
11:22:34 am
He worked at a large automotive company
Barry Schwartz:
11:22:48 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:23:33 am
#1 source of traffic was the corporate site and the site was terrible with bounce rates
Barry Schwartz:
11:23:40 am
The site wasn't meeting user expectations
Barry Schwartz:
11:24:32 am
They has all these authoritative sites but they weren't using it
Barry Schwartz:
11:24:41 am
So they wanted to create an authority hub
Barry Schwartz:
11:25:01 am
They went to sub domains
Barry Schwartz:
11:25:29 am
They moved two sites, into one. They couldn't have any down time. They had to mitigate dup the content period
Barry Schwartz:
11:26:07 am
Tip he said to use is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live but he didn't call it TTL
Barry Schwartz:
11:26:38 am
They had to prove it would sell more cars before anyone moved ahead with it.
Barry Schwartz:
11:26:56 am
Come up with a plan to move the site, QA, revert back if things go wrong, communicate plan.
Barry Schwartz:
11:27:09 am
Measure everything from rankings to traffic, bounce rate, 404s, etc
Barry Schwartz:
11:28:08 am
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11:29:43 am
Good results!
Barry Schwartz:
11:30:21 am
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11:30:40 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:31:50 am
Shari is up but I can't live blog her
Barry Schwartz:
11:32:10 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:32:13 am
See, you can't see her now.
Barry Schwartz:
11:33:05 am
Anyway, next sessions at 1pm PDT
