When migrations go wrong
Imagine that you ran a shop for many years.
Things were going well but you had to move to a new location in the same city.
How do you tell people about this?
We’ve moved! Same city, different location
We’ve moved! Find us 101 Knickerbocker Way
Option 2 is the right one because it tells people that you’ve moved and where to find you.
Option 1 sucks. It’s unhelpful. And you risk losing business in a bigger way.
How does this relate to SEO?
When you do a site migration, you have to redirect URLs from the old domain to the new domain. And you want to do this at a 1 to 1 level (eg. olddomain.com/cool-beans → newdomain.com/cool-beans)
This is Option 2 above. It tells humans and search engines that you’ve moved and where to find you.
If you do Option 1 with your website migration, you either don’t have any redirects or you simply redirect every page on the old site to the homepage of the new site.
It’s commercial suicide.
You will lose traffic and rankings and visibility and money.
Someone on twitter thought that a successful website migration was impossible.
He kept everything the same when moving things over to the new site (URLs, content) but only gets 10% of the traffic he used to get.
Why?
He didn’t put in any redirects of any kind.
Of course he’s learnt his lesson now.
And hopefully you’ve learnt one too.
If you get your redirects in order, everything will be just fine.
Otherwise, time to file for Chapter 11.
Peace,
Jaaved
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