Do you plan to upgrade your platform?
Site migration is a delicate operation that requires meticulous preparation to avoid the risk of losing traffic and SERP positioning. To do so, it is essential that you ensure URL continuity, by means of a mapping file. To facilitate indexing for your new web pages, sitemaps need to be updated.
Ensuring URL continuity
When you move from one site to the next, several elements are likely to result in losing visitors:
- Former URLs continue to be proposed by search engines after publication of the new site. It takes a certain lapse of time before robots consult and index the new version of a web page.
- Certain links from other sites, in particular social media, refer to pages that are deeper than the homepage.
- A page that receives a number of links is potentially more interesting than one that yields few.
Consequently, if nothing is done to ensure that links to former pages take the user to the newly created web page, Google is incapable of transferring acquired popularity between the sites, leading to its loss.
Creating a mapping file
To ensure correct transfer of old URLs towards a new site, we recommend you implement 301 redirects. We suggest URL matching between each page. To do so, we try to find an equivalent page or a similar theme in order to execute redirection. This document is generally forwarded to the web developer, who then integrates it within the site via a .htaccess file.
Preparing sitemaps
The aim of a sitemap.xml file is to reunite all the available pages on the site in order to facilitate indexing when robots intervene. If such a file already exists, it will need to be updated with the new URLs. If the former site had no such file, then we recommend you create one, taking great care to mention all the URLs to index.
