Virtually every marketer or entrepreneur will have to deal with a website migration at some point. Examples include a migration due to a change in the URL structure, a new domain name, internationalization, or the implementation of an HTTPS certificate.
If you make a mistake during a website launch or migration, it can have a major impact on your search rankings. That’s why we’ve listed the most common mistakes so you don’t overlook them.
The robots.txt file on your server has a major impact on how your website is crawled. Since you don’t want the website to be crawled in a test environment, a ” Disallow ” is usually included in the robots.txt file.
Disallow
With a Disallow, you deny crawlers access to (part of) the website. What is often forgotten afterward is to remove the Disallow when the website goes live.
As a result, you have a new or modified website that crawlers cannot access. This causes your rankings to drop, even though it’s easy to prevent.
A second way to block the indexing of a test environment is to use the noindex meta tag () on all pages of a website. This tag is added to a page’s HTML and tells crawlers that the pages should not be indexed.
noindex
The same applies to the noindex as to the Disallow in the robots.txt file: it must be removed. It’s a good idea to add a meta index tag to all pages after the site goes live. That way, you can be sure that your new website will be indexed.
index
You’re not the first person to still have the ` noindex ` tag in your code, which caused your entire website to suddenly disappear from search results.
In many cases, pages have already been removed from existing websites, after which a 301 redirect was set up to the new URL. If you’re migrating a website, you need to make sure that the old redirects are also properly transferred. Redirects must remain online for at least one year. If you take them offline, you’ll lose rankings and value.
If you’ve carried over your old redirects, you’re on the right track. But don’t forget to set up new redirects as well. With every SEO migration, something in the URL structure changes. Whether you’re switching to a new domain or changing your current URL, you’ll need to set up redirects.
See also: 7 Steps for a Successful SEO Migration.
There are few guarantees in the world of SEO, but losing rankings when you don’t set up redirects is one thing we can guarantee.
Redirects are an important part of a migration and require sufficient attention. When you’ve imported your old redirects and set up new ones, a redirect loop may occur. URL A is then redirected to URL B, URL B to URL C, and so on.
This will negatively impact your crawl budget, your page value, and your search rankings. So make sure there is only one 301 redirect.
Tip: With our HTTP status code tool, you can easily check whether a redirect loop has occurred.
When migrating to a new domain name, the old sitemaps are sometimes overlooked. These sitemaps contain URLs that point to the old domain. So be sure to check carefully that your sitemaps are accurate.
Your website can be accessed in several ways. For example, someone can visit your website via http://website.nl, but also via https://website.nl.
http://website.nl
https://website.nl
If you don’t set up a 301 redirect from the HTTP version to the HTTPS version, Google will crawl two versions of your website. This isn’t an ideal situation. It results in duplicate content, which Google penalizes. Therefore, make sure you always set up a 301 redirect from the HTTP version to the HTTPS version.
In several migrations, we’ve seen that people forget to transfer old content to the new website. When the URL structure changes, Google compares the content on the old page with the content on the new page. If the content matches, the new page will take over the rankings more quickly.
But what if the content doesn’t match? In that case, it will take much longer for Google to realize that the new page should take over the rankings of the old page.
Of course, you may need to rewrite the content entirely or in part. In most cases, we recommend that (parts of) the content on the old page match the content of the page to which the old URL redirects.
Are images important to your website? If so, it’s important to redirect images from the old URL to the new one. Images are often overlooked in a redirect plan, which means it takes a long time for your images to become searchable again in Google Images.
You can’t scrape image URLs from Google Search Console, but you can collect them using tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb.
A website migration carries risks, and it’s easy to make a costly mistake. The same applies to SEO migration errors: prevention is better than cure. By checking your website for these common mistakes before it goes live, you can avoid the negative consequences of a migration error.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive to achieve results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With more than 15 years of experience in the field, Jarik has built up a wealth of knowledge, ranging from technical SEO to complex migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help companies achieve their online growth goals. He is also the author of the book *GEO – Being Visible in AI Answers*, which explores how companies can remain discoverable as AI search engines reshape the search landscape, and he is a frequent speaker.
His academic background in Information Science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in Natural Language Processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about search engine visibility, but about sharing knowledge and guiding companies toward sustainable online success.