Wolfgang Digital held their annual digital marketing conference in the Google Foundry on June 16th 2017. Gareth spoke about site migration and SEO.

2. 3 most stressful things in life

3. Website Migrations

4. Types of Migration
Domain to Domain - Redesign, upgrade CMS
Merging Domains - Absorbing a network, expansion or purchase
HTTP to HTTPS
Old domain to new domain - Rebranding

5. Types of Migration
HTTP to HTTPS
56% of all SERP results are HTTPS
70% of all search results will be HTTPS within 2017
https://moz.com/blog/half-page-one-google-
results-https

6. HTTPS Migration
Why it’s important

7. HTTPS Migration
• URLs get lost
What can go wrong?
• Create a redirect loop
• Duplicate site content

8. HTTPS Migration
What can go wrong?

9. Set up and verify your security certificate
Create benchmarks for Rankings, Site Speed, Traffic, etc
Find your most valuable pages (Traffic and External Links)
Crawl your Legacy site (Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl or Xenu) to get a
full list of URLs
Get a full list of backlinks pointing to your site (Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush,
Search Console)
Create properties in Search Console for secure/non-secure and www/non-
www version of the site (4 properties)
Set Geolocation in the HTTPS SC Properties
Make sure Canonical tags are absolute, not relative (same for
HREFLANG tags)
Create a redirect map of all Legacy URLs, use this opportunity to redirect
weak or low value pages to high value pages (301 Redirects)
Create a new HTTPS Sitemap.xml
Create a new Robots.txt file, reference the HTTPS Sitemap.xml
Check your owned channels (Email, Social, Networks), for HTTP URLs
Update your Paid channels to HTTPS URLs
Verify the GA codes are in place for the new site
HTTPS Migration
(Find, and organise your stuff to take it, neatly, to the new
house)

10. Upload Robots.txt
Upload Sitemap.xml to SC
Ensure Canonical tags (and HREFLANG tags)
indicate the HTTPS URLs
Update all internal URLs to secure versions
Change owned channels to new versions
Change paid channels to new versions
Make Sure tracking tools are monitoring the
HTTPS URLs
HTTPS Migration
(Tell everyone your new address)

11. Use list mode in your crawlers to crawl the Legacy URLs into the new site -
to check for missed/broken redirects
Monitor traffic
Monitor rankings
Fetch as Google and request indexing for main navigation URLs in SC
Monitor backlinks and update any that break (Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush,
Search Console)
Check Search Console (and Moz) for crawl errors
Monitor SERPS for indexed pages
HTTPS Migration
(Make sure you left nothing behind)

12. HTTPS Migration