Preserving SERPs during a New SIte Launch

[leslieevarts]

Hi there,

Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to help. You people are stellar.

When launching a new site with concern for preserving the site's organic placement, which attributes or data are the most important to keep consistent from the old site to the new one?

For example, site structure, urls, meta data, image file names, and so on.

Thanks again!

[benesmartin]

Hi Leslie,

If I understand the question correctly, you want to preserve indexing of the new site by Google.

One of the ways you can do it is inserting tags "noindex, nofollow" into the HTML source code of all the pages. Also, you can setup the robots.txt files - write there "Disallow: /folder-of-pages-you-don't-want-to-be-indexed".

Hope it helps. Feel free to respond in this thread for any other questions.

Cheers, Martin

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Leslie

Google actually provides an awesome resource right here to help. I heavily suggest reviewing it with your team.

I would also check out these great guides from Moz called Web Site Migration Guide and Recovering Your Organic Search Traffic from a Web Site Migration Gone Wrong. The latter is more post launch but it will help you think of things before you launch and also help you notice things going wrong after.

All of the above are great resources and will help get you on the right path. I would also suggest not forgetting our friends at Bing - while they may not be a huge portion of your organic traffic, every little bit helps.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have further questions or concerns - good luck!
Patrick

[leslieevarts]

Very helpful. Thank you so much Patrick.