I have a SEO question. My brother and 2 partners have bought a 2 year old company from some other guys. I’m working on a new eCommerce site for them (based on Wordpress, Astra, WooCommerce, and Elementor).
Since the original/current website is build using Drupal, we want to move from Drupal to Wordpress, from one hosting provider to another and change the language on the website (from Danish to English and then use the WPML plugin for translation).
While I’m ok experienced in onpage SEO and building a website, I have only moved domains a few time, and never a domain, where SEO was worth focusing on.
Based on below SEO stats, I’m looking for a bullet-list, regarding what to do, and understanding if actions would be ‘worth the effort’.
According to Website Auditor the current domain has 129 indexed pages by Google
Domain strength is listed to 3,76 of 10
It has 22 backlinks, and 6 linking domains (18 of them are ‘DoFollow’)
It has a lot of signals from Facebook and some from Instagram
It has no relevant ranking keywords, other than it’s brand-name, and a 10-15relevant retailer names on page 3-10 in Google. All keywords with low traffic (SE-ranking estimates as little as 137 organic clicks per month)
Serpstat indicates a pagerank of 27% and a trustrank of 11%
Based on the number of indexed pages, and some pages, that has been linked to or from, I guess the site was hacked in the past. If I remember correct, you can tell Google in ‘Google Webmaster Tool’, what links you approve, and what should be listed as spammy.
I have the new hosting provider in place, and I more or less have a draft site ready, for when the domain has been moved. However, I try to understand, what needs to be done before the move, IF SEO is worth taking into consideration. While I have some ideas and thoughts regarding redirects, sitemaps and indexing, I know some of you guys are more experienced in this area, so I hope you might have a list or a few pieces of advice.
***Based on a response in another place let me emphasise, I move from Drupal to Wordpress, and launch 100% new content, and a 90% new URL structure - but on an existing domain, that currently run a Drupal site, that needs to be moved and replaced with a WooCommerce site. My guess is, I should let all old pages be redirected to a relevant url on the new website or the root domain? Afterwards I guess I should make sure the new site get indexed as fast as possible. I guess most of the work should be done in the Google Webmaster tool?
Thanks for your help in advance
Rasmus
Personally I'd:
- Crawl the existing site - save to Excel
- Run a search in Google for:
site:domain.com
Then export the list (use Chrome SEO quake extension) and add to Excel
Put both lists into 1 Excel file & de-duplicate.
Next, get the sitemap of your new site, so you have all the URLs.
Then map every old page from the site crawl and Google site: command search export to a NEW URL on your new site structure. Try to match to relevant pages.
This way you can build '301 redirects' from the old URLs to the new ones, to help avoid too much loss of link equity (and avoid too many 404 error page views by visitors!).
If there's a lot of pages, prioritise older (old structure) pages that have:
1) Most number of backlinks
2) Most amount of traffic (if you have Google Analytics access).
Lastly, if you can access server log files, you can parse this info from these and look for other pages to redirect... though this is quite a lot more advanced.
Oh, and yes - Google Search Console (WMT) - you can check for 404 error pages there to redirect to (ideally relevant!) pages on the new URL structure.
Hope this helps!
Well, to be honest using Wordpress for e-commerce is a big no-no.
It’s bloated, easily hackable and not a truly scalable e-commerce solution for serious selling.
Moving a domain and hosting providers does not affect SEO, unless there is an issue with the previous or new server being blacklisted.
That being said, it doesn't look like their current site has a lot of SEO juice anyway. Changing all the URLs WILL hurt their SEO if those are the URLs in their backlinks. I recommend looking at their backlinks to see which ones you should redirect, testing the site for broken links AFTER your restructuring is complete, and making a new sitemap.
I could give you a more specific checklist or help with your sitemap, but I would definitely need more specifics.
Yes, 301 redirect old page names to new relevant ones. If you have almost no non brand ranks, then don't overthink it but do the redirects. Then as always look at your bad links using variety of tools and compile all the links. Review each one because some with low authority may be ok and visa versa. Google Search Console is where you upload the dissavow file to turn bad links "off". Then check the new site for duplicate content. Start adding more in depth pages and blog posts including great content worth linking to and email people who link to similar content to promote it along with Facebook boosts.
How did your relaunch go?
