Twelve less common mistakes during a website migration that impact SEO

Less common, but crucial, mistakes that can impact SEO during a website migration:

1. Not updating the robots.txt file: The robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engines which pages or files on your website should not be crawled. If you forget to update the robots.txt file during the migration, it can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your new website properly.
2. Failing to preserve the website’s authority and trust: During the migration process, it’s important to ensure that you preserve the authority and trust that your website has built up with search engines. This can be achieved by maintaining the same domain name and by properly redirecting your old URLs to the corresponding new ones.
3. Not properly handling HTTPS and SSL certificates: If you are switching to HTTPS or changing your SSL certificate during the migration, it’s important to properly implement and test these changes to ensure that they don’t negatively impact your SEO.
4. Not properly handling mobile and desktop versions: If you have separate mobile and desktop versions of your website, it’s important to ensure that the migration process properly handles the redirects and content for each version. This can be a complex process and requires careful planning to ensure that the mobile and desktop versions of your website are optimized for search engines.
5. Failing to update structured data: Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page to search engines. If you fail to update the structured data on your new website, it can prevent search engines from understanding the content and context of your pages, which can negatively impact your SEO.
6. Not properly handling internationalization: If you are launching a new website in multiple languages or targeting multiple countries, it’s important to properly implement internationalization to ensure that search engines can understand and index your website properly. This may involve using hreflang tags and creating separate versions of your website for each language or country.
7. Not properly handling redirect chains: Redirect chains occur when a page is redirected to another page, which is then redirected to a final destination. If you have too many redirect chains on your website, it can slow down the loading time and negatively impact your SEO. It’s important to minimize redirect chains during the migration process.
8. Failing to update social media links: If you have links to your website on your social media profiles, it’s important to update these links to the new URLs after the migration. This will help ensure that users can easily access your new website from your social media profiles.
9. Not properly handling pagination: Pagination is the process of dividing content into multiple pages, typically with a “previous” and “next” button. If you are migrating a website with paginated content, it’s important to properly implement and test the pagination to ensure that it works correctly and that search engines can crawl and index all of the pages.
10. Not properly handling canonical tags: Canonical tags are HTML tags that indicate to search engines which version of a page should be considered the “canonical” or primary version. If you fail to properly handle canonical tags during the migration, it can cause confusion for search engines and negatively impact your SEO.
11. Failing to update or maintain backlinks: Backlinks are links from other websites to your website and are an important factor in your search engine rankings. If you lose backlinks during the migration or fail to update the links to the new URLs, it can negatively impact your SEO.
12. Not properly handling site-wide changes: If you are making significant changes to your website’s design, functionality, or content during the migration, it’s important to carefully plan and test these changes to ensure that they don’t negatively impact your SEO.

By avoiding these mistakes, you can ensure that your website migration goes smoothly and does not negatively impact your SEO.