Jarik Oosting is Senior SEO consultant at SmartRanking: “As an SEO agency, we work for multiple clients, which is why we have experienced a lot of things. One of the things that can quickly go wrong is a website migration. This is not to scare you, we perform countless migrations, but it is good to prepare a migration as well as possible.
During a migration we did for a client, everything went smoothly, until the moment of going live. When the webshop went live, we immediately saw that the entire live environment had been set to noindex. We immediately called the client and the builder, but the webshop builder had disappeared off the face of the earth. In no way - not by e-mail, phone or WhatsApp - could we get hold of the builder.
Google crawls the webshop in question often and only after a whole day the noindex tag was removed. The damage was fortunately somewhat limited, but it is still a shock. Especially if you immediately see canada telegram data that something is not going well, and that is also the reason why monitoring is important, but then you can no longer reach the builder.
Sometimes it is also a struggle to work with a development party. At a B2B client we worked with the developers who had built the website before we started the SEO process, but there were several major technical problems. Think of canonical URLs that were missing, an XML sitemap that was not present, no meta descriptions were used, the website was accessible via the www and non-www variant, etc.
Almost everything you could do wrong technically went wrong. After a document with concrete action points, the developers got to work. However, with almost every release, an earlier change was undone. For example, the trailing slash redirect was set and then the canonical URLs suddenly disappeared from the source code. All in all, it took 6 months and a lot of time and management to get the technology in order. This just goes to show that one development party is not the same as the other.
At yet another client, we were hired to fix a migration error. What turned out? The webshop had been taken apart, but many URLs (old categories) had never been redirected. Also URLs with parameters had been overlooked. In the end, it came down to only 20% of the URLs being redirected correctly, which resulted in a significant loss of traffic and revenue.”
