Google has released a new video on site migration. John Mueller provides insight into how Google handles site migrations and how long it will take. The main takeaway is that site migrations can be difficult and require a comprehensive plan before migrating.
The video starts with a question:
“We are currently doing a site migration and we also want to rebuild the URLs on the site. Does this pose any risk?”
Migrating a site usually means changing the domain name, sometimes because a company merges with another or a branding change.
Linking the two sites together is the trickiest because you have to choose which URLs to keep and which to merge into similar existing pages.
John Mueller replied:
“Unfortunately, while this sounds like a small change inside the site, it’s not that simple for search engines.
In particular, search engines like Google store their indexes on a per-page basis.
So if you change the address or URL of a page, you have to forward that page’s data in some way or it will be lost.
It doesn’t matter if you completely rebuild your site or just remove the slash from the end of the URL. These are essentially site relocations. “
John Mueller offers site migration tips
1. Research options and potential impacts
Site migrations can be disruptive, so it’s important to plan your migration by mapping one site to another. One way is to divide the two sites into sections and see if the sections map to each other.
From there, map URLs one-to-one and determine which URLs cannot be moved to the new site and should resolve to 404 responses, which can be difficult if there are links to those pages. That’s why it’s important to plan ahead, thoroughly.
Mueller recommends:
“As these changes take time and have ranking implications, you are also advised to consider when to act.”
Screenshot of Google’s John Mueller
2. Create a list of old and new URLs
This is an important step.
According to John:
“…this tip will help you track and review changes later.”
A good practice is to create a spreadsheet of URLs, which can be done easily with Screaming Frog.
Once the redirects and new URLs are done, you can check the work by uploading the old site structure list to Screaming Frog so it can crawl the URLs.
It’s easy by choosing model > list then click upload Drop down the menu tab and select the file type to upload.
Screaming Frog will grab the old URLs in the list and show which URLs are redirecting to the new URLs and which are not, and return a 404 page not found error response code.
404 URLs may be URLs that don’t make it to the new site (if they weren’t planned to be intentionally removed).
You must determine if the 404 is the correct response (which you intend to), or if the URL was inadvertently excluded from the site migration and needs to be mapped to a new URL.
3. Implement the migration
Mueller recommends:
“301 Redirect all old URLs to new URLs while updating all internal mentions, for example:
- Link
- form
- structured data
- sitemap
- and Robots.txt file”
4. Monitor the migration
Mueller recommends using Search Console for this:
“Check all pages for redirects. In Google’s Search Console report, you should see quick changes to the most important pages, followed by slow changes as our system reprocesses the remaining pages.”
Mueller warned that the final part could take months to complete.He talked about how Determining overall site quality can take months. Google has to basically understand what a site is about, including site quality, and understand where the site is on the internet.
John recommends keeping redirects for at least one year.
In my experience, it may be worth considering keeping redirects for more than a year. The reason is that old URLs with links to other sites on them will become broken links if the redirect is removed.
You can create an outreach campaign with links to your contact site and ask them to fix the link to point to the changed URL.
But you have to be aware that doing this kind of outreach can be counterproductive, as some sites may decide to remove the link entirely for a number of reasons.
Also, there may be links that you don’t know about, so you can never be sure that all inbound links have been updated. So for this reason it may be necessary to keep these redirects and be prepared to update them if some URLs change again to avoid creating link redirects.
A chain redirect is when one old URL redirects to another old URL, which redirects to another old URL before redirecting to the final URL. Over the years, this can generate a series of redirects, which can be problematic for crawling.
Website migration is tough
It’s important to plan ahead, as Mueller suggested. Map similar pages together and be mindful of link fairness from inbound links. A site migration can cause your site to lose search results, but this doesn’t have to happen if a thorough migration plan was in place.
