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CEO at Econsultancy
11 August 2008 09:52am
Sometime around the end of November, or early December, E-consultancy.com (this site) is due to relaunch.
It'll be broadly similar in content and structure to the current site but have a load of new stuff, a new design, a new brand identity etc.
The site will be hosted in the United States (currently in the UK) and will be at "econsultancy.com" rather than the current www.e-consultancy.com i.e. no 'www' sub-domain and dropping the '-'.
Effectively, then, in Google's eyes we could appear a new site, with a new domain, on a new IP range (in a different country).
Which, given our good natural search rankings at the moment, could well be tantamount to SEO suicide.
We're keen to track, and publish, the results of what we do so that others can learn - possibly from our mistakes! I'm sure it'll be much more interesting if it goes wrong than if it goes right. Maybe if it all goes horribly wrong then at least we'll get a load of links to the 'new site' from the resulting PR ;)
The one thing we're concentrating on doing as well as possible is making sure that the correct redirects are in place, at a page level, so that PageRank should transfer from old to new. But we still might lose our overall domain credibility / authority. And, if so, we're not sure for how long.
What experience have others had of this? Any things which have turned out to be particularly important (or unimportant)? What's worked and what hasn't?
Regards
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
Technical Project Manager (MBA, MBCS, CITP, CEng) at Naxtech.com
11 August 2008 10:13am
Hi Ashley,
it sounds somewhat similar to what we recently did for a well established european link directory, iozoo.com, where the site was in essesce dropped and was resurrected. ..and you know how Google tends to handle these kinds of domains in these days. You'll most likely not have a direct pagerank transfer but "old" site will certainly help with the re-calculation which will most likely take place.
I do not think anyone can predict the length of the switch-over but given that the redirections are done properly and that the new site is SEO optimised, the results should be fine. The most important thing I think in this process would be to try and see everything from the search engine's point of view with regard to the status, structure, and link (to the old side). With that in mind it may be worth looking not only at the code, whether it is search engine optimised and redirects, but also things like DNS entries, settings, IP classes, etc.
I hope this helps.
regards,
Denis
www.naxtech.com
Technical Project Manager (MBA, MBCS, CITP, CEng) at Naxtech.com
11 August 2008 10:19am
Did I mention that iozoo.com has PageRank-6, just like e-consultancy? ;-)
regards,
Denis
www.naxtech.com
SEO Director at Guava UK
11 August 2008 10:34am
The most interesting part of this will be the domain and country move, so I'm also interested in how it shakes out. Make sure you have the consistent analytics in the old and new websites that can monitor the referrer traffic sources so you can show how they may have changed before and after.
In terms of redirects, you'll want to get your 301s as precise as possible on a old page URL > new page URL level. That may well mean you have 50,000+ redirects set up but in my experience it really makes a difference if you do this well.
Depending on the the continuity of content between the old and new sites you may be able to do a big chunk of this with automated redirection rules for entire sets of URLs, and then rest by creating a old page to new page redirection array that can be used in which ever redirection handling script or technique works best for your setup.
In terms of testing these routines we have a pretty well tried and tested methodology:
1) audit indexed and published URLs
2) audit test site URLs
3) planning and implementing automated and predefined redirections
4) testing all the redirections on the test server if possible
> go live
5) testing all the redirections on the live site and implementing any fixes
It sounds like a lot on this scale (50,000+ URLs) but parts 1,2, 4 & 5 we automate with our Ascendex tools, not sure how other people do it.
If you need a hand give me a shout.
regards
Teddie
SEO Director
Tel: 0870 0630707
Web: http://www.guava.com
CEO at Econsultancy
11 August 2008 10:46am
Thanks Teddie.
What do you recommend for old pages that don't have any corresponding new pages (e.g. content that we're removing in the new site)?
Should these go to a customised 404 saying there is now a new site, or should you / can you redirect them all to the new homepage (would Google see this is 'spammy' or OK)?
Ashley
SEO Director at Guava UK
11 August 2008 10:58am
I think that depends on whether there is new content that you and potentially Google would think was an appropriate match, I wouldn't tend to 301 deep pages to a homepage. If there was content that was very similar I would consider 301's to the best match because you are endeavouring to ensure visitors can be correctly routed to the content they are interested in, and this type of good user experience is also beneficial to search.
If the content is completely gone and no appropriate match = custom 404
If the content is gone but there is a very close match (IE. an old marketing report) = 301 to the best match (perhaps to the reports homepage?)
Teddie
SEO Director
Tel: 0870 0630707
Web:http://www.guava.com
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
13 August 2008 06:27am
Other than authority / credibility, how important really is PageRank?
There are those that argue that PR doesn't help SERP much at all and that most people don't have the PR bar turned on on their Google Toobar, so are unaware of PR altogether.
I asked about PR on other forums after I built a small site for a photographer and saw it's homepage jump to PR4 within a month. It eventually settled on PR3, but even now there are not many links passing on PR to it.
So my theory is that Google gives considerably more weight to content, how it's structured and linked, as well as links pointing out than PR from external links. Maybe I'm stating the obvious...
My predicition is that if your new site will retain a well thought out and executed IA then PR will remain high.
Multichannel Strategy Director at Specialist Holidays Group - TUI Travel
15 August 2008 13:54pm
Hi Ashley
Looking forward to the new site... it's been a while in the pipeline right? ;o)
We did the whole site re-launch thing earlier this year and it is rather scary. You appear to have re-directs under control, this was the key for us. Also make sure you have an analytics 404 report set up so you know what inbound links are 404'd on arrival.
A Custom 404 to say we've updated our site, recognising elements within the URL and populating a site search box within it is a good idea. You can track this data too.
Finally, perhaps a too simple question - why do you need to make all these big changes at the same time? It might make more sense to update the site functionality & design first and then move domains, hosts etc later.
HTH
DJ
PS If you need beta testers, you know where I am!
Director at Watson Hall Ltd
18 August 2008 13:33pm
Ashley
Some thoughts on the SEO impact (and more).
Due diligence
You mention moving the site to a different hosting location. Do some due diligence checks on the proposed new IP addresses to check if has been used previously and whether the previous use was anything you might not want to be associated with, or has been excluded by web/email filtering/firewall systems. Check the new email server address if this is changing as well. Also check what else is hosted on 'nearby' IP addresses in the same range.
If the new domain name was previously owned or used by someone else, do due diligence on that too.
Hosting
I guess you will have the opportunity to negotiate a new hosting contract, so try to build in appropriate service level agreements (make sure these are understood, metrics are defined unambiguously and what exclusions exist). You don't want your new site to have an availability issue at the same time as it is being re-indexed by search engines.
Ensure you have the right to test the security of all the systems hosting your new website.
Define who can access what on your servers and ensure there is sufficient logging and monitoring of log-ins and site changes.
URLs and domains
A change of domain is also an issue for your existing users too, not just search robots. For pages that don't have a new URL, you may want to consider using 404s for robots but a search of the new website for the words used in the title of the previous page. But where possible, users might appreciate a direct mapping of the old address to the new site:
www.e-consultancy.com/page12.htm
econsultancy.com/page12.htm
and your web server could automatically do this permanent redirect, for URLs that didn't match some other remapping. URLs in existing content (such as these forum posts) could be time-consuming to alter, so generic redirects can help. Ensure your remapping works for all domains such as:
Note the current forums inline editor automatically hyperlinks addresses beginning with 'www.' but not the new shorter domain.
Prepare for the changeover to ensure that the lag associated with updating domain name servers doesn't mean that any user is without a site (old or new). It looks like you're already thinking about this since http://econsultancy.com already redirects to the current (old) site.
You may want to consider delaying using an 'exclude all' in your robots.txt file on the old domain until the new site is sufficiently indexed, so that it dies out more slowly on search engine listings.
Mask the server details
If your new website will be using completely different URLs, take the opportunity to mask some of the information which malicious hackers use to seek out vulnerabilities. The current site URLs suggest that ASP is used:
http://www.e-consultancy.com/site/map.asp
and so do the HTTP headers:
...
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Powered-By: ASP.NET
...
Some people use search engines to find web sites to attack. There are more ways to determine the operating system and application software, but the current situating makes it very easy.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.e-consultancy.com
Data protection
Real users may also be concerned about the relocation offshore. They signed up to:
"Your Personal Information is stored in our databases, which are located in the UK."
http://www.e-consultancy.com/about/privacy.asp
The existing privacy statement and terms will need to be updated and existing users requested to agree to the change of the data location:
"If we are going to use your personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify you via email, prior to making such changes."
http://www.e-consultancy.com/about/privacy.asp
Check you Data Protection Act 1998 registration number Z4942204 again before the move.
Regards
Colin Watson
Technical Director
Watson Hall Ltd for website security
SEO at Cheapflights Media
22 August 2008 15:19pm
There's some very good advice already included here, but one little nugget to add. More of a comment about the current nuts and bolts, but worth considering as you go through this process.
It appears that the regular expressions that power the URL rewriting currently have vulnerabilities.
I just followed a link from another blog to an e-consultancy post with the following URL:
http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/366171/title-script-src-http-www0-douhunqn-cn-csrss-w-js-script--is-pr-broken.html
odd looking, isn't it?
The same page can be accessed by navigating through this site here:
http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/366171/is-pr-broken.html
So somewhere along the lines "title-script-src-http-www0-douhunqn-cn-csrss-w-js-script--" has been added, but the page works just the same. You could easily replace this with whatever-you-like.html and still have a functioning URL returning a 200 server response code.
So a few considerations with this:
1. Duplicate content issues today.
2. Ensuring with the migration that you don't just redirect your intended original URL's, but all possible variations.
3. Make sure your URLs aren't susceptible to this on the new platform.
Best of luck with the change over.
Adam Crawford
Head of Search
Propellernet
www.propellernet.co.uk