In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 7:12 am
We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.) How we executed the migration To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost. 1. 301 redirect mapping To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.
For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?) We made a list of every possible URL and
URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is south korea gambling data essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.
We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward. We made sure to redirect everything via 301.
This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal. Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform.
or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs. 2. Maximum sitemap management A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps: 1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console.
For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?) We made a list of every possible URL and
URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is south korea gambling data essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.
We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward. We made sure to redirect everything via 301.
This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal. Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform.
or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs. 2. Maximum sitemap management A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps: 1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console.