Site Migrations: SEO Mythbusting
GLENN GABE: I wrote a post
actually one time after I helped a large-scale e-commerce
retailer that hadn't 301 redirected its images, right,
so that the images were n– MARTIN SPLITT: Oh, right. Mm-hmm. GLENN GABE: Right. So I wrote a post about, like,
don't forget to redirect images during a migration, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Definitely. Visual content– so important. GLENN GABE: Very important. You would recommend, obviously,
making sure to 301 redirect all images– MARTIN SPLITT: Yep. GLENN GABE: –and
then just wait. If it takes a little longer
to refresh in the image index, then just do that, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Definitely. Definitely. And just check the server
logs on the old domain to see if traffic
really has ramped down. And once you are happy with not
seeing as much crawl activity, you can flip the switch and say,
OK, we can now discard this.
[THEME MUSIC] Hey. And welcome, everybody, to a new
episode of "SEO Mythbusting." With me today is Glenn Glabe. And we usually meet
at conferences, when we're speaking on various
stages, or we talk on Twitter. But what are you
doing when we are not meeting on conference occasions
or when we are on Twitter? GLENN GABE: Yeah, sure. So I run my own
consulting business, G-Squared Interactive,
where I typically am helping companies that have
experienced a drop in traffic.
MARTIN SPLITT: Cool. GLENN GABE: Yeah. MARTIN SPLITT: All right. That sounds pretty awesome. GLENN GABE: Absolutely. MARTIN SPLITT: And
today, we are here to talk about one possible
issue that they might encounter, and that's site moves, right? GLENN GABE: Site
moves, URL migrations, domain name changes– right. Exactly. MARTIN SPLITT: All right. OK. That's really cool. So what are the
misconceptions or problems that people are facing there? GLENN GABE: Yeah, sure. So there's lots of myths. And there's actually
a lot of confusion in the industry about these. Some site owners are scared to
actually pull the trigger on it because they don't know
what's going to happen. And others are actually pulling
the trigger too quickly– not preparing for it. And then there's a lot of
people in between, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hmm. GLENN GABE: So I
guess the biggest myth is that you will always
experience a drop in traffic with a domain name
change or site migration. MARTIN SPLITT: Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. I think that's a very good
one, because the answer to it is, it depends, as you know.
So a lot of times,
people are not understanding what
a site move is. So if you are literally
just moving from one domain to the other– copying pretty much the
entire URL structure and the entire content over– then you will not necessarily
see a drop of traffic. You will see that traffic drops
off over time on one domain and picks up on the other. But overall, that
doesn't really mean that you have a traffic drop–
you're not losing traffic.
If we can do this
very clean move, then there's not really
going to be a drop period, where one drops and
then the other picks up. But there is more
a fluid transition. GLENN GABE: Got it. Now, what's interesting is that
I've been part of some domain name changes– let's stick on
that one for a second– that went completely smoothly. Sometimes the site will
actually go up over time, so on and so forth. Then there were some
weird anomalies, right, where– and like you
said, it depends, right? So a site that, three days
after, completely tanks by 70%. And is it based upon the
history of the domain? Maybe the domain that
they're actually moving to was bought and had a
history of its own. Is there anything that you
could elaborate on that maybe? MARTIN SPLITT: So normally,
it's not much about the history. The history does play
a little bit into it, especially if it's
basically being used for spending purposes
and then you buy in and immediately switch.
That's a tricky one. You want to make
sure that you're not dealing with weird issues. And you want to make sure
that you have your monitoring, and Search Console, and
all that set up properly before you do the switch. It can also just be– if you are making other changes
as part of your site move, that's a risky one. Because then we can't really– we don't know that
it's just a move, but we see, like,
oh, hold on, the– when we are crawling
this, there's differences in what
we are seeing here. Hmm. Maybe we need to be careful
and re-crawl a little more. And then you might– depending on how
large your site is, you might want to do
crawl budget things.
So it depends on a
bunch of factors, but normally getting
a domain that you know is not dealing with
issues from the past should be just fine. And even if it's a
domain with history– we are aware that content
on domains do change. But depending on what the
domain looked like beforehand, we might not consider
it a site move. And then we would have
to re-crawl and reprocess everything. And that takes a little longer. GLENN GABE: Interesting. So let's say that
there is a site– a domain name that was used– I'll give you an
example, actually. It was a client that had
a really long domain name. They were an
e-commerce retailer. And they were like–
wow, they want to get just the four-letter
domain name that represented their company. They finally got it. They went live with it, right,
did the domain name change. And then they called
me about a month in. And they're like, oh,
no, this is not good.
What's going on? It ends up that domain
they didn't research. And it was some, like,
rock band from the past that had all sorts
of crazy spammy links and all sorts of stuff. MARTIN SPLITT: Ooh, yeah. GLENN GABE: So they definitely
in the short term saw a dip, but then it corrected
itself over time. MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. As we see, content can change. You bio spam your domain,
or you just literally have it hacked for a
while and then you fix it. You know how that goes, right? Whenever you have problems that
we detect and point out to you, and you fix them, it
takes a while for us to understand that
it has changed and that everything
is better now. But that's generally
what happens. So you want to make sure
that you will clean out anything that might be
problematic up front and give us time to understand
that things have now changed and we are now back
to a clean slate.
So you have to do
some cleanup if there was problems in the past. GLENN GABE: Got it. So in that situation,
it probably would have been
smart, first of all, if they researched the history– MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hmm. GLENN GABE: –and then
maybe filed a disavow if there were a
bunch of bad links there, just to make
sure from the beginning that this was more of
a cleaner transition? MARTIN SPLITT: If you
take over the domain, make sure that you are measuring
what happens through tools like Search Console,
and that you understand how the domain is doing. Maybe even consider
removing the content and waiting for us to understand
that the content has removed– so that things are
normalizing and we are clearing out the signals.
And then, step by step,
migrate your domain over so that as we discover
the pages to be moved, we also understand,
like, OK, so this is a new start for this domain. GLENN GABE: Got it. OK. All right. How about another myth? MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, sure. Yeah, hit me. GLENN GABE: Or–
and then we could– MARTIN SPLITT: What do you have? GLENN GABE: And then we could go
into more details of what go– MARTIN SPLITT: All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. GLENN GABE: –goes
on behind the scenes. How about taking a site,
merging two sites into one site, and thinking that 1
plus 1 will equal 1 when that won't necessarily happen? MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. GLENN GABE: And I've been part
of a few of those that actually went very well and others
that didn't go poorly, but it wasn't 1 plus 1 equals 2. MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. So that's not such a
simple situation anymore.
Now, beforehand, we
talked about a site move. And "site move"
literally just means we're moving everything we've
got over to somewhere else. That's the site move. The moment I'm
combining two sites– that's not moving
two sites into one. That is creating a new site that
is a merged version of the two. So that is, by definition,
not a site move. This means that we have
to understand, OK, so now there's a bunch of more
this content moves here, this content moves here. But there's a bunch
of other things going on here– it's a
completely different domain. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just, like,
the URL structure change in some way or
another, or there's there's new content moving
here from somewhere else.
None of that is as
simple as a site move. So we have to basically
re-crawl a lot of pages. Depending on how
large your site is, that might mean that
it takes a while for us to literally just get a
lay of the land in terms of what content is there now. Depending on how you set
up your site structure, we might understand,
OK, this just, like, new section of the
site has been created. Or if you're, like,
mixing them in, then it's like, uh,
what's happening here? Did the other things
change as well, or is it just this new content? So depending on how
you merge the sites, you might get very
different results from how we are coming to an
understanding of your new site structure and your
new site content. And that can go smoother
or less smoothly depending on how
you do it, yeah. GLENN GABE: Got it. Got it. Now, with a domain name change–
just to hop back there– so I'm really interested– and I
know site owners are interested in this, and a lot of
SEOs, I'm assuming– what goes on in
the Google machine once the site move,
the domain name change, is triggered, right? Change of Address
is switched, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Right.
GLENN GABE: That's activated. 301s are in place. What happens? MARTIN SPLITT: So what happens
is that eventually we're going to be crawling what we
used to know about your site. And we do get the
signals from other sites pointing to your content there. And we understand, OK,
there's a redirect, and it's not a
redirect in isolation. It is basically literally
just completely move here. And then we have to
make sure that what we knew before is true for
what happened afterwards, because you could
hypothetically have changed the site fundamentally.
And then, again, it
is not a site move. But as more we discover
that it's basically just a one-to-one copy and it's
just like moving everything over from here to
there, we will basically make sure that we forward
the signals that we had from the old site to the
new site, to the new domain, and then make sure that we
are getting more or less an efficient lay of
the land without having to re-crawl everything. You might still see
increased crawling activity, but eventually that's
going to settle down as we understand
that the site is just a copy of what was there in
the different space beforehand. And then, eventually,
the signals will fade out and the crawling will fade
out on the old domain. And we're just going to be
moving swiftly on as if nothing happened afterwards
with the new signals that we have for the new domain. GLENN GABE: Got it. Got it. And how fast do
signals get passed? MARTIN SPLITT: That depends
on so many different things. If your website doesn't get
crawled as much, then, pfft, there's nothing that's
going to make that go– [SNAPS FINGERS]– like this.
GLENN GABE: OK. MARTIN SPLITT: If there's a
lot of crawl demand and crawl budget for your website,
then we might actually do that relatively quickly. It can be in a day. It can take a week. It really depends. Also, how many links do we
have from different sites? How often do we crawl these? And how quickly can we
discover that everything has been moved over? And yeah, it can take a few
days, up to a few weeks. GLENN GABE: Got it. MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. GLENN GABE: And what does
the Change of Address tool do differently than
just having 301s? Is there some trigger in the
back that Google's like, OK, the Change of Address
tool is being used. We know that it's
verified by this owner. Is there something better
that happens there? MARTIN SPLITT: It tips
us off that this is what you were intending to do.
So we know that it's
not a temporary thing, or that it's a
mistake, or something. You're explicitly telling us. You're giving us an
additional signal, saying, like, hey, we're moving, rather
than us being like, hold on, that's a bunch of
redirects happening here. Do we– is– what's hap–
is that– what's going on? So you're giving us a
more explicit signal that this is a site move. So we can probably
re-prioritize things. We can make more
useful decisions in how we want to
crawl and how we want to identify if we can
pass the signals on or not. And that might speed
things up because we can take a few shortcuts
if we know that this is an intentional switch. GLENN GABE: Got it. So good to do? MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hmm. Definitely. GLENN GABE: Right? OK. One thing I've seen– and I don't know if
this is true or not, but I'm just
wondering when there's a site move if there's a
reassessment of quality on a site? Like, when there's a
domain name change, is Google going,
OK, well, now let's re-evaluate quality there? Or if there was
a URL migration– URLs all changed– would it
trigger something like that? MARTIN SPLITT: Well, that
happens constantly, right? If you have a page that
has high quality content, that doesn't mean
that this will always be high quality content, which
is also why having a history is not the end of everything.
If you have a spammy or
thin-content page that was bad and you improve it, we are
going to reevaluate the quality as well, right? It constantly happens. Site move is no different. But obviously, when you
change URLs and especially URL structure, then that tips
us off to, like, oh, hold on, there's some– we're not sure about this. Is this the same as
we had beforehand? If so, we can just move the
signals over to the new URL. If we are not sure
about this, we have to make a very careful
evaluation if that is true or not. So yes, it is doing that, but
it does that all the time. GLENN GABE: Got it. Got it. So basically–
I've heard before, from John and stuff
like that, that they're going to re-evaluate a
piece of content based upon its current form, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. GLENN GABE: So that's kind
of what you're saying, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. GLENN GABE: So it
would make sense that sometimes– because
what I've seen is, let's say, a domain name change
happens, a URL migration.
And then maybe two weeks
later, there's a core update. And suddenly, the site
either goes up or down. It's like, was that
due to the change, or was it something random? MARTIN SPLITT: No. Things always fluctuate, right? So it's really hard to see
the signal from the noise there in site moves. Especially if it really
is just a site move– so you changed your
domain name or something– it don't really change the
quality evaluation or something like that, no. GLENN GABE: OK. Now, we spoke about
signals being passed. Can you just, for some people
that might not know it, what signals you're
talking about, or? MARTIN SPLITT: Right, right.
So to explain that in
very simple terms, when we visit a site, we collect a
bunch of information, right– so how fast is the site? Is this HTPS or not? Is the content good? What's this page about? All this kind of stuff. All these signals and
information about the page that later go into ranking. There's, like, hundreds of
these factors that we look at. And we collect them per page.
If you would go to a
restaurant, you kind of do the same thing, right? It's like, do I
feel welcome here? Is the staff nice? Is the food quality nice? Is the price fair? These kind of things
you put in your file as signals for this restaurant. And then if someone ask
you for a recommendation, you are probably using these
signals that you picked up– like, oh, if you're
into Asian cuisine, that place on the 35th
Street, or wherever, is really, really
nice, but quite pricey. And if you then know that
this restaurant has moved, you probably want to re-evaluate
some of these, right? So it's like, oh,
yeah, I was there when they were in
the other location.
It was fantastic. I don't know how it is
in the new location. So that's kind of
the situation that we are facing as well, right? If you're literally just
moving everything over, you can be like, yeah,
no, the restaurant just moved somewhere else,
or the food truck moved somewhere else. It's the same food truck. It just stands somewhere else. It's nice. It's still cheap. Nice, good stuff. But if something changes– the food truck now
moves into a location. And then you're
like, is that nice? Is it still the same stuff? Is it still cheap, or
is it now more pricey? And that kind of is true
for search engines as well. We have to then re-evaluate
what we are seeing, right? GLENN GABE: So first,
we had a baby algorithms analogy from Gary [INAUDIBLE] MARTIN SPLITT: [CHUCKLES] Yes.
GLENN GABE: And now we have
a food cart analogy from you, which– MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, yeah. It just keeps getting
more colorful, doesn't it? [LAUGHS] GLENN GABE: Absolutely. I can see a blog post coming
out about that one too. How about this one, right–
and this happens sometimes. Let's say there's a domain
name change or a URL migration. Traffic plummets
for whatever reason. When do you revert, right? When do you– MARTIN SPLITT:
Fair enough, yeah. GLENN GABE: –roll
this whole thing back? Now, only a few
times in my career– and I've been through
a ton of these– have we had to do that. And I know in the
Google documentation it basically says,
you have 180 days to reverse the Change
of Address and then you kind of put 301s all
the way back from where they were coming from. It's like a total nightmare. MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. GLENN GABE: So from
your perspective, when do you think– let's
say a site saw a drop of 50% after a migration,
for whatever reason.
At what point do
you go, yeah, maybe you should roll this thing back? MARTIN SPLITT: I
think that depends on what you're identifying as
the reason for what went wrong. You definitely want to
do some diagnosis first before you do any
moves in any direction. It's like, so is it that we
are still seeing the old ones and for some reason
not registering that these are re-directions? Or are we just not crawling
the old ones often enough so that we have just hit
a really nasty spot in the timeline of where we
could potentially have moved? Or what's going on here? If you really do not understand
where this is coming from, and you have looked
at everything, and you cannot explain
what's happening, I would say after a few
weeks, maybe a month– maybe give it a
month or something.
And then I would consider
either getting help– that's the best way to do it. Get some help somewhere
with this stuff– or if you really don't
understand what's happening and it doesn't get
better after a month or so, consider
doing a reversion. But only if you are really,
really sure and out of options. Because most of the times, it is
some sort of technical problem, or it's like, you missed
half of your re-directions and we didn't really
register that it was a change of address much,
or whatever has gone wrong. There's so many things
that can go wrong and we can misconfigure. But you want to see traffic that
drops off eventually also pick up again on the other side. And you want to monitor
both sides closely. And if you really see
that there's literally no pick-up on the
other side, then that's a sign that something was
not well done or well thought through. And then you want
to reconsider if you might want to go
back for a while, understand what happened,
and then regroup.
GLENN GABE: Right. Or something algorithmically
happened, right– MARTIN SPLITT: Or something
algorithmic can happen. GLENN GABE: –which
is possible, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Or if we
detected spammy content or you had some issues in
manual actions, that's also a good reason to
say, like, OK, we don't want to get
these in the mix. GLENN GABE: Got it. MARTIN SPLITT: So
make sure that you're starting from a clean state. And then you should
not have to revert. GLENN GABE: Got it. And then on that note– so
from a robots.txt perspective, there are some sites– I usually help
large-scale sites. Sometimes they have
a few 100,000 URLs being blocked by robots.txt. And they'd want that, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hmm.
GLENN GABE: So during
the move, does it make sense to open
them up so Google can see all those old URLs
that maybe it had indexed but were blocked by
robots.txt or anything? Or does it– would
you think that just– MARTIN SPLITT: I
would not change that. I would just keep– if you had a reason to
not have them crawled, I don't see why a
migration would necessarily mean that you need to
have them crawled now. GLENN GABE: Got it. OK. That's good to know, because,
again, some large-scale sites have a ton of URLs
categorized as that. And then they don't
know what to do. So– [LAUGHS] How about problems that
you see from Google's end after a migration, like
robots.txt blocking the new domain, or no index
across the entire new content, or how about Google
Search Console settings not being
set on the new domain? MARTIN SPLITT: Oh,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
GLENN GABE: You know,
things like that. MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, yeah. It's all sorts of these things. I think one of the things is
that some people are trying to use site moves
as an opportunity to change all sorts of things– GLENN GABE: Ah, I was going
to bring up that later, yeah. MARTIN SPLITT: –which
is really, really weird. Because realistically,
you want to– if you're in an unsure situation or
if you're in a situation where you're not sure
where you're going, you don't want to change all
the variables at the same time, because that means you have
a lot of moving targets. And then, later on,
if you have a problem, you're like, oh, no, is
this our new URL structure? Or is this the new
technology that we're using? Or is this the new
content that we put up? Or is it the site move? Or is it an algorithmic thing? Or is it a penalty? Or what's happening here? And you're not sure about this. If you're doing one
step at a time– you move to a different
domain, or you– before you move domains, you're
switching to a new text deck, or whatever you're doing,
do it step by step.
GLENN GABE: OK. MARTIN SPLITT: I think
that's the biggest thing that you can do for
yourself to keep level-headed. GLENN GABE: Got it. Got it. And do you– does Google have
anything behind the scenes kind of like what you brought
up, where some sites are like, well, I'm going to change
domain names because I've been algorithmically destroyed
over the past few years or to get out of manual
action, if some people think that they're going to do that? MARTIN SPLITT: [CHUCKLES] GLENN GABE: Back
in the day, people were doing that for Penguin. And some people were
saying that was working. So is there anything
behind the scenes that when, let's say, a domain
name change happens, they go, well, let's make sure
that this is cool or not? Or is it not– I don't know. MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah. As I said, we are
constantly evaluating what happens on the page. So if you have a bad bunch of
content and spammy links to one and then you just
move to the next, then we might lose some of
the signals along the way.
But basically, bad stays bad
no matter where you move. Yeah. GLENN GABE: Got it. OK. That's good to know. MARTIN SPLITT: Awesome. GLENN GABE: Well,
I think that was– probably that was– MARTIN SPLITT: That
was [INAUDIBLE] GLENN GABE: That was a
lot of information, right? MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah,
that was amazing. GLENN GABE: Yeah. MARTIN SPLITT: Thank you
so much for making it here. And I hope that you all
enjoyed our little conversation on site moves.
And stay tuned for more. Bye. [THEME MUSIC] Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that episode. Next episode, I have
Lily Ray with me. And what are we going
to discuss, Lily? LILY RAY: We're going to talk
about, is too much content a good thing for SEO. MARTIN SPLITT: All right. So stay tuned..
