Web migration and SEO: 4 points to consider

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One of the worst situations you can find yourself in after migrating a website to a new format is the loss of SEO traffic . Even if the new content, structure or design improves the previous version of your website, not taking into account some aspects such as redirects or link depth can be fatal for the functioning of the website.

There are multiple factors that can affect a website migration scenario . Today we are going to focus on those that would affect a website in which we updated the content, structure and design, without modifying other variables such as the domain or HTTPS encryption.
1. Redirects
One of the most essential points in any web migration: redirects. As long as we don't have the ideal scenario in which we don't change any URLs when updating our portal, it will be necessary to carry out 301 redirects (the most common case) or other types of actions.

Through 301 redirects, we can tell Google and other search engines that the URLs they had in their index have changed and direct them to the new version of them. It is worth noting that it is also possible that there are pages on our uae telegram data website that we want to abandon , so returning a 410 status code will be enough to let them die.

To summarize, we can follow these steps to ensure that we carry out all the necessary redirects so that the organic traffic of our website migration is not affected in this area:

List all the URLs of the current version of your website . There are multiple options for this, from extracting the URLs through the website's own database, using a crawling tool, with Google Analytics for the most visited pages, Search Console...
Identify which URLs we want to redirect and which ones we will abandon . Here we can evaluate aspects such as their positioning, traffic volume, usefulness for the user, etc.
Create a list of the new version URLs .
Cross-reference both lists , indicating the relationship between the URLs of the current version and those of the new one.
Generate 301 redirects , either through the .htaccess file, programmatically, or other methods.

On websites with a small volume of pages, we can cover all of them in this process. But on portals with a large volume of URLs, for example an e-commerce site, we will sometimes have to prioritize those that generate more traffic or use resources such as regular expressions to automate the procedure.
2. Content review
Although the web design team has done a fantastic job with the new visual aspect of the portal, they may not have taken into account aspects such as maintaining the H1 of the pages or reducing the volume of content on them. Special mention should be made of the Title and Meta Description tags, which we should pay special attention to in these situations.

Although it will be common to introduce changes during a web migration, we should minimize their impact by trying to ensure that the new pages of our website retain the structure and bulk of content. Therefore, before publishing the new site, it will be mandatory to carry out an SEO review of it.