How can you prevent algorithmic penalties during website migration or redesign?

Website migration or redesign can be a daunting task for any business, especially when it comes to maintaining or improving your SEO performance. If you don't plan and execute your site changes carefully, you may end up with algorithmic penalties from Google or other search engines, which can hurt your organic traffic, conversions, and reputation. Algorithmic penalties are automated actions that lower your site's ranking or visibility based on certain signals or criteria that indicate low quality, spam, or manipulation. In this article, we'll share some tips on how to prevent algorithmic penalties during website migration or redesign, and how to recover from them if they happen.

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1 Audit your current site

Before you make any changes to your site, you need to have a clear picture of your current SEO status, strengths, and weaknesses. Conduct a comprehensive audit of your site's technical, content, and link aspects, and identify any issues or errors that may affect your SEO performance. For example, check your site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexation, canonicalization, meta tags, content quality, keyword optimization, duplicate content, broken links, redirects, and backlink profile. Use tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Moz to help you with your audit.

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2 Plan your site changes

Once you have your audit results, you can start planning your site changes based on your goals and priorities. Whether you're migrating to a new domain, platform, or hosting, or redesigning your site's layout, structure, or content, you need to have a clear roadmap of what you're going to change, how you're going to change it, and why you're changing it. Make sure your site changes align with SEO best practices and user expectations, and don't compromise your site's quality, relevance, or authority. For example, avoid changing your URLs unnecessarily, deleting or thinning your content, or losing your backlinks.

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Vijay Vasu

Saving Exceptional Companies from Mediocre SEO | Ex. UBER, Zendesk
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If you have a large enterprise website coming up for migration, consider dedicating resources from a project management perspective and also consider getting a specialist SEO agency to support the migration. There are three key stages to any migration, Planning, Execution and Post Migration, each of these is a lot of work and needs to be done perfectly. Audit your website, delete zero value pages, set up re-directs, be sure you have analytics set up, have a roll back plan, and try and do this over the weekend.

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3 Implement your site changes

When you're ready to implement your site changes, you need to be careful and methodical. Don't rush the process or launch your new site without testing and verifying it. Follow a checklist of steps to ensure your site changes are done correctly and smoothly, and avoid any errors or glitches that may trigger algorithmic penalties. For example, use 301 redirects to preserve your link equity and avoid 404 errors, update your internal links and sitemaps, use robots.txt and noindex tags to control your crawl budget and indexation, monitor your site performance and traffic, and inform Google of your site changes using Google Search Console.

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Eduardo Martinez

Digital Marketer Creating Ideas | WordPress | Bilingual | Seeking E-commerce Opportunities
(edited)
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When it comes to changing the title, having something that monitors that change of URL of the title will make a big difference when it comes to SEO practices. I learned this the hard way over the years so making sure traffic goes to the new url will allows a site to get traffic without 404 errors. Some plugins on WordPress tell you that a change has been made and recommend a 301 redirect with one click. Making it easy to change. Bulk changes require a plugin that lets you import them from a csv file that contains old url to new url with additional rules as well.

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4 Monitor your site performance

After you launch your new site, you need to monitor your site performance closely and regularly. Track your site metrics and KPIs using tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and other SEO tools, and compare them with your baseline data before the site changes. Look for any signs of algorithmic penalties, such as sudden drops in rankings, traffic, impressions, clicks, conversions, or revenue. Also, keep an eye on any changes in Google's algorithms or guidelines, and how they may affect your site's SEO performance.

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5 Fix any issues or errors

If you notice any issues or errors on your new site, or if you suspect you've been hit by an algorithmic penalty, you need to act quickly and fix them. Analyze your site data and identify the root cause of the problem, and implement the appropriate solution. For example, if you have technical issues, such as slow loading, broken links, or redirect loops, you need to optimize your site speed, fix your links, and check your redirect chains. If you have content issues, such as low quality, spam, or duplication, you need to improve your content quality, remove or rewrite your spammy or duplicate content, and use canonical tags or noindex tags to avoid confusion. If you have link issues, such as unnatural or toxic backlinks, you need to disavow them using Google Search Console.

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6 Request a reconsideration

If you've fixed your issues or errors, and you're confident that your site complies with Google's quality guidelines, you can request a reconsideration from Google. A reconsideration request is a way to ask Google to review your site again and lift any manual actions or algorithmic penalties that may have been applied to your site. To request a reconsideration, you need to use Google Search Console and follow the steps and instructions provided by Google. You need to explain what happened, what you've done to fix it, and why you think your site deserves a second chance. Be honest, transparent, and detailed in your request, and provide any evidence or documentation that supports your case.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Eduardo Martinez

Digital Marketer Creating Ideas | WordPress | Bilingual | Seeking E-commerce Opportunities
(edited)
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Would consider different methods of migration when it comes to sites. WordPress for example, there are many backup plugins to consider when migrating. One question to think about is which one works best to get what you want. Would suggest having 2 methods in case one doesn't work on different hosting. Using a subdomain on the new hosting to see if does transfer without problems. Some hosting companies do offer a migration plugin so do consider that as another method.

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How can you prevent algorithmic penalties during website migration or redesign?

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1 Audit your current site

2 Plan your site changes

3 Implement your site changes

4 Monitor your site performance

5 Fix any issues or errors

6 Request a reconsideration

7 Here’s what else to consider

Search Engine Optimization

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