Skip to Main Content
The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition
book

The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola
August 2015
Beginner content levelBeginner
994 pages
27h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER TWELVE

Domain Changes, Redesigns, and Troubleshooting

Whenever you make structural changes to your website, there is a risk that you will confuse the search engines and harm your search rankings and organic traffic. The types of site changes that can influence your site’s organic search performance include changing your domain name, changing your content management system (CMS), redesigning your site, adding ecommerce functionality, changing your blog platform, and many others—basically, anything that fundamentally alters your site’s frontend and/or backend visual or functional elements can potentially influence your organic search performance.

In this chapter, we will review the various scenarios from the top down. Be sure to refer back to “Content Delivery and Search Spider Control” to review the technical specifics of options for moving content from one location to another.

Google groups site moves into one of two categories (http://bit.ly/site_moves): moves “with” URL changes, and moves “without” URL changes. It provides specific guidelines for handling moves within each category.

The Basics of Moving Content

“Moving content” refers to a situation in which content that used to be located and accessed at one URL (e.g., http://www.yourdomain.com/pageA) is moved to another URL (e.g., http://www.yourdomain.com/products/pageA). One of your goals when you move content is to make sure users and search engine crawlers that attempt to visit the old URL (/pageA) are presented ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Rand Fishkin, Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola
The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola
Storytelling with You

Storytelling with You

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
The Art of SEO

The Art of SEO

Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491903629Errata Page