12 site migration mistakes that damage SEO
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What is damaging your SEO?
The thought of a website migration going wrong and experiencing a big drop in organic search rankings after you’ve spent time rebuilding it can be extremely daunting. However, fear not, as this outcome can be completely avoidable!
Site migrations, when done correctly, are a powerful tool when it comes to improving your website’s SEO. If your site does need rebuilding, it might be because you want to improve site structure, user experience or content improvements… the list is endless.
In this blog, we’ll explore 12 of the most common site migration mistakes that businesses make, explaining why this is the case and how you can avoid doing the same thing. Don’t forget to choose Embryo when it comes to optimising your site migration SEO, and request your free consultation with us today.
What is a site migration?
Before we get into it, you might not know what a site migration actually is.
To put it simply, a site migration is the process of moving a website from one location or platform to another. It typically involves changing the domain name, switching web hosting providers, or updating the website’s platform or software.
A website migration could also be as simple as changing your URL from HTTP to HTTPS, but really, any significant change to your website that could affect your visibility in search engines is considered a site migration. These changes can be big or small to be considered as a migration.
No matter what changes you make, you need to make sure that you’re performing a migration correctly so that you can keep business moving as usual. And, of course, you don’t want to lose any of your hard-earned search engine visibility!
The 12 site migration mistakes that could be damaging SEO
So, to preserve your search engine rankings and minimise the risk involved, we’ve found some common mistakes that you should try to avoid. We’ll go through:
- Not migrating title tags
- Not tracking 404 and other error pages
- Using 302 directs
- Redirecting masses of pages to the home page
- Going live with root directory disallowed
- Not redirecting non-HTML assets
- Not protecting your external links
- Not changing the robots.txt file
- Changing everything at once
- Removing important pages from the navigation
- Rushing the process
- Disregarding social media
Let’s have a look at ways that you can preserve your site migration SEO in a bit more detail…
Title tags are an essential element of SEO and can have a significant impact on your rankings. Not only do they help search engines determine the relevancy of a page, but they also encourage users to click through from the search engine results page.
Most content-checking teams, however, pay little attention to title tags. This can be easily done as they aren’t technically on the page, but instead on the header of the page. Common mistakes when it comes to migrating title tags include empty title tags, as well as generic and more basic title tags. Clients sometimes may also not post over the original title tags, as well as not importing the new brand across.
2. Not tracking 404s or other error pages
One of the biggest worries when it comes to site migrations is moving over to a new site and ending up with thousands of 404 errors. These errors can significantly impact your site’s SEO performance.
To avoid this happening, it’s important to run a site crawl on your new site to identify all 404 pages, 500 server errors, and any other crawlability issues. Once you’ve identified any and all of the broken pages on your site, you should ideally find a suitable replacement page for them that works. By doing this, you can optimise site migration SEO and minimise the risk of losing any valuable keyword rankings for your website.
3. Using 302 directs
Using 302 directs during your site migration can be a common mistake because they signal a temporary move which can ultimately cause confusion for search engines. When a search engine sees a 302 redirect, it will be reluctant to index the content of the new page as it’s still holding onto the content of the old page.
Therefore, to improve the indexability of your new pages and to avoid any vulnerabilities, it’s best to stick with 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, which tells the search engine that a page has permanently moved to a new location. They will also ensure that link equity is passed to the new URL, and users are seamlessly directed to the correct pages.
4. Redirecting masses of pages to the home page
One of the most common mistakes that take place when it comes to site migrations is companies rushing their redirects by pointing all of their pages to the home page. It might sound like a good idea, as you might think that you’re saving a lot of time that could have been spent managing your redirects. However, this can have serious implications on your SEO performance.
Each of your old pages will have some sort of authority or rankings in the search engines, so, when you redirect an old page to an irrelevant page, this authority ends up going to the wrong page. This can then hinder the performance of the new ‘relevant’ page in the search engine results page.
So, you should redirect old pages to new pages that will match the searcher’s intent, as this way you have a better chance of maintaining your search engine rankings after you complete your site migration.
5. Going live with root directory disallowed
If you choose to put your website live with the root directory disallowed, it can leave your website vulnerable to attacks because it bypasses essential security measures. Operating with root privileges means that there are no user accounts or password protections, making it incredibly easy for hackers to gain access to your site and potentially cause serious damage.
If your website is going live with the root directory disallowed, you are essentially blocking search engines from indexing your entirely new site. So, unless you want to intentionally block your new site from appearing in search engine results, you should review your robots.txt file very carefully before going live.
6. Not directing non-HTML assets
Many clients often forget that non-HTML assets such as images or PDFs can drive loads of traffic to their sites. Therefore, it’s no surprise that redirecting these assets is often forgotten about during site migrations. If you want to keep your rankings as they appear in your image results, we suggest keeping the image size and file name exactly the same when you redirect the images.
This will ensure that your images are not de-indexed from Google during a site relaunch. Broken or missing non-HTML files can also significantly slow down your website’s loading speed, which is a critical factor for both the user experience and the impact of site migration SEO. ]
7. Not protecting your external links
Another common site migration mistake is not protecting your external links. So many companies forget all about their hard-earned backlinks during a site migration, but there are 2 ways you can protect your external links:
- Don’t break your most linked pages – it’s essential to monitor pages on your site with a high number of external links to make sure they don’t end up broken or forgotten about.
- Update external links to go with your new site where possible – this is recommended, but not essential. If you have the time, it’s especially useful when migrating to a new domain and boosting your SEO performance.
Remember, broken external links can disrupt the user experience and make your website appear as unprofessional and unusable.
8. Not changing the robots.txt file
During a site migration, forgetting to update your robots.txt file can lead to several issues, especially when it comes to crawling and visibility for search engines. If your old robots.txt file remains in place, search engines will continue to follow outdated instructions, potentially blocking important pages on your new site or allowing access to pages that should be blocked.
Make sure that you create a new robots.txt file for your new site, ensuring that it accurately reflects your desired crawling and indexing behaviour. After implementing this, use tools like Google Search Console to test how search engines are interacting with your site and make necessary adjustments.
9. Changing everything at once
Going in hard and changing everything at once during a site migration can be a risky move as it can be difficult to pinpoint issues if they arise.
Our SEO expert, Amy Leach, offers her insight: “Many clients may see it as a time to overhaul their site design, content, meta data, and everything else, when in reality it should be kept as it is in order to be monitored accurately to find impacts.”
If something goes wrong after a massive change, then it can be incredibly hard to isolate the exact cause. You might not know if it was the new server, the updated CMS, or the new website design. Too many major changes can also temporarily disrupt your SEO, as search engines re-index your site.
During a site migration or rebuild, it is very common for businesses to change the navigational structure of their site, but it is recommended to keep any changes to the site’s navigation minimal. Ideally, you want to either improve or keep the position of your important pages in your site’s hierarchy. This way, the page will be able to maintain it’s search engine rankings after a site migration.
The closer the page is to the site’s homepage, the higher its chance of ranking high in search engines.
11. Rushing the process
Like any project, rushing through it and not taking your time can lead to oversights and errors, as well as the increased risk of technical problems. When you rush your site migration, it’s easy to overlook critical steps, such as setting up proper redirects, testing the site thoroughly, and updating sitemaps. These oversites can lead to problems such as 404 errors, broken links, and other issues that can negatively affect site migration SEO.
Rushing through the process can also increase the likelihood of technical problems such as server downtime, database errors, and website crashes. Eventually, these errors may disrupt the user experience and could potentially ruin your brand reputation.
It’s no secret that social media has a significant impact on SEO. Therefore, if it’s disregarded or neglected while you’re completing a site migration, it can be a costly mistake. Many websites link to their content on social media platforms, so, if you don’t update your social media profiles with the new URLs, these links will become broken, maybe leading to a lot of lost traffic.
To combat this mistake, ensure that you update all of your social media profiles, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, with the brand new URLs for your website. You can even use your social media channels to update your followers and customers about the website migration and highlight any new features or improvements.
Hear from one of our experts
Now you’re a bit more clued up on the most common site migration mistakes, it’s time to hear from one of our SEO experts here at Embryo on their thoughts.
Lola Fudger-Gálvez, SEO Account Manager, says: “If your site is moving servers, then the developers must check that they are not blocking crawlers from being able to access the site. They can whitelist all important crawlers such as GoogleBot and BingBot to help. Not ensuring this can actually cause the site to be de-indexed, which is never fun!
I’d suggest QAing as much as possible before you go live on a staging site – this is especially important if a company is redesigning pages and wants to add a certain ‘flair’ that impacts page speed. Google simply does not want to send users to pages with extremely poor page performance scores.”
Complete your site migration with ease with the experts from Embryo!
Hopefully, you’ve now got a better understanding of site migration SEO, specifically the things that you should be avoiding. As we’ve discussed above, there are a key number of mistakes that businesses are making, but now you’ve got a head start, they should be easy to avoid!
Remember, a smooth and successful site migration requires careful planning and execution in order to preserve your SEO value and ensure a smooth transition for your users.
Still want to wrap your head around SEO? Then get in touch with our expert team, who are always on standby to perform a site migration for you.
