Website Architecture and Site Migration Guide (2015)
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This document serves as a comprehensive guide on website architecture, design, and migration, focusing on essential SEO strategies for web developers. It emphasizes best practices such as creating user-friendly URLs, maintaining proper site hierarchy, and implementing 301 redirects to manage duplicate content. The guide also outlines a structured approach for site migration, including pre- and post-migration steps to ensure successful transitions without negatively impacting SEO rankings.
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Website Architecture and Site Migration Guide (2015)
- 1. Website Architecture, Design & Migration Guide Sankar Ponnusamy, Priceline.com, Jan-2015 Introduction The purpose of this document is to provide an easy- to-understand guide to website architecture, basic design guidelines and ecommerce SEO tips. Basic SEO Guidelines For Web Developers • Make pages primarily for users not for search engines - Google • Make site with a clear hierarchy and links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. HTML sitemap (consists of hierarchical listings of the pages) can be used to display the structure of the site. HTML Sitemap is usually placed on the footer so that the very deepest level of content is reachable to the crawler within 3-4 clicks, effectively flattening the site architecture. Nordstrom, has a well-optimized HTML sitemap. Brand pages are hierarchically organized in alphabetical order • Use Keywords to create descriptive, human friendly URL Structure If the content is ac- cessible throughout multiple ways implement a 301 redirect or rel=”canonical” attribute on the duplicate URL(s). Page 1 of 5
- 2. • What happens when a user removes part of a URL? prepare site to show content in such situations or have a custom 404 page with links to other pages they might want to go to. In the below example removing ”table- lamps” from the url will take users to ”furniture” category.https://www.1stdibs.com/locations/new- york-usa/furniture/lighting/table-lamps/ • Ensure breadcrumb navigation is present. • Apply the following best practice on page tem- plates: unique title, unique description, unique H1’s & Optimised alt tags • Notify Google of mobile sites. • Pay attention to product (Hotel Property) URLs Refer section 1.2 • Google is no longer indexing and ranking tabbed or click to expand contents. Here is an examples of tabbed content from a major e-commerce site, which could be avoided. (**comment added June 2015, p.s refer to recent Google guidelines, as there is some changes on tabbed content) Best Practice: Amazon display most of the user generated content directly on the page, making the user scroll to the end to see the content. • Use schema markups and social media Open graph protocols in the page template. URL Structure Best Practices Basics of A Good URL Structure Fundamental success of a site and its seo depends on the URL structure. It is a common practice for ecommerce websites to logically organize its pages into categories, sub-categories and product level pages. Example: Root: www.example.com Category page: www.example.com/category- name Sub-category: www.example.com/category- name/sub-category-name Product page: Requires different approach. *discussed under Product URL Structure section below* Categories and sub-categories are the most impor- tant pages of the site and thus, will be targeting important keyword terms. Another popular way of site architec- ture is to show the full user path: Ex- amples: 1stdibs.com/locations/new-york- usa/furniture/lighting/ homeaway.com/vacation-rentals/new-york/upstate- new-york/r413 Product URL Structure Product pages are different from category pages. These pages need a special consideration, as same product can exist in multiple categories creating duplicate content issues. For Example: ”Pink Nike Women’s Torch” can exist in the following two categories www.example.com/women/shoes/pink-nike- womens-torch or www.example.com/nike/pink-nike- womens-torch Another example: ”Sumner Hotel” in Brooklyn area can exist in Brooklyn or Downtown Brooklyn or Bronx category pages then we could end up with 3 urls serving the same content. www.example.com/hotels/brooklyn/sumner-hotels www.example.com/hotels/bronx/sumner-hotels www.example.com/hotels/downtown- brooklyn/sumner-hotels In this scenario, it’s best to use canonical tags, explained in section below Recommended Ways Of Combating This One URL per product coming directly from the root level www.example.com/sumner-hotels-brooklyn or www.example.com/pink-nike-womens-torch One URL per product coming from category page www.example.com/hotels/sumner-hotels-brooklyn or www.example.com/product/pink-nike-womens- torch Regardless of which path the user takes to the product page, the breadcrumb could still show the path they took to aid user experience, i.e. breadcrumb will be home>hotels>us>brooklyn>sumner-hotels Page 2 of 5
- 3. home>hotels>us>bronx>sumner-hotels home>hotels>us>downtown-brooklyn>sumner- hotels respectively. Site Migration Guidelines: What exactly is going to change in the redesign? • Is there any front-end design changes associated with the migration? • What about code base? Is it going to change ? • Focus on information architecture and/or page URL Structure. URL structure change requires a proper 301 redirect strategy. • Content: Migrate most of the content from the legacy site to its equivalent new counter part. For instance, /old-page-abc may have valuable text content which could be transfered over to /new-page-abc • Internal Links: Maintain legacy sites internal linking structure. With a change this big, temporary rankings and traffic declines are likely. keeping this in mind, elect a best time for the migration to happen. Migration Process Collect Data And Establish SEO Baselines Step 1. Crawl the existing legacy site to generate a list of URLs that can be used to test redirects if/when the URL format changes. Step 2. A crawl of all the external backlinks will generate a list of linked URLs. Step 3. A crawl of the new website on a staging environment can be compared to the live website. The reports will highlight any technical issues with the new website in addition to highlighting any changes in the site architecture. Step 4: Launch and post-migration Monitoring. After the big day, it is important to monitor Googles crawl and organic traffic. New Site Development Block Crawler access: Make sure that the test environment is not accessible to search bots. • Block the test dev via robots.txt Add the following code on robots.txt: User−Agent : ∗Disallow : /Test−server−name • Remember, search engines can still crawl the site and possibly index the new URLS. So, password protect the test environment or only allow access to certain IP ranges. • As a third layer protection, add meta robots noindex to all pages. metaname = ”robots”content = ”noindex” Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate content issues should be identified and resolved as early as possible. Common cases includes: 1. Internal search generating duplicate pages under different URLs. 2. URLs with added parameters after the ? character. (URL parameters such as click tracking and some analytics code can cause duplicate content issues). 3. Directories with and without a trailing slash example: priceline.com/hotels should be redirected to priceline.com/hotels/ Page 3 of 5
- 4. Page by Page 301 Mapping This is the heart of our migration progress from an SEO standpoint. Make sure legacy site pages 301 redirect to their newer counterparts. Assuming the new URL Structure to reflects the path user took: prieline.com/hotels/us/new- york/brooklyn Here is the page by page url mapping looks like Example: Mayoclinic.com moved to the .org TLD in Jan 2014. Here is the redirect path Crawling And Comparing Test vs Live Site, using Deepcrawl Using DeepCrawl (a 3rd party site crawler) crawl the new development environment and compare it with the legacy site. Make sure there is no difference in data between the development and the live site. Such difference will impact SEO rankings. Make sure the internal linking structure remains the same. Figure below, illustrates Example dash- baord comparing live vs test site: Handling XML Sitemaps: Generate New XML sitemaps containing new pages. Submit new XML sitemaps to Google & Bing via Webmaster tools Keep old XML sitemap to track indexed pages, expected to decrease Site Goes Live: Checklists Make sure 301 redirects work Check webmaster tools for other source code errors. Monitor webmaster tools or crawl errors such as 404, soft 404, 302 etc. Make sure the analytics code installed on all pages and tracking. Make sure PPC container tags & other affiliates tags are installed. Monitor changes in organic rankings, traffic and con- versions 1 Reference http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine- optimisation-seo/seo-content-strategy/five-seo- tips-for-product-pages-on-ecommerce-websites/ http://us.searchlaboratory.com/blog/2012/10/basic- site-structure-click-depth-for-seo/ Page 4 of 5