Most Common SEO Issues When Moving Your Website
You’ve been thinking about making a move for some time, and now you finally have the chance to do it. But before you push that button, there are a few things to consider: Is your website ready for the big change? Do you have a site move checklist? How will search engines react to this change-up?
This post will go through four SEO issues that you may encounter when moving your website. You may not be aware of these SEO issues, but they can significantly impact your site's visitors and search engine ranking.
1) Duplicate Content in the New Location
The first issue you may encounter is duplicate content in the new location. It may have been the result of copying and pasting pages or images during the process.
Duplicate content is an SEO issue that can significantly impact visitors and search engine rank. If this happens, it would be best to remove as much of this duplicate content as possible, or else you risk having Google penalize your site by lowering its rank in the search results.
2) Broken Links
Another SEO issue when transferring your website to a new domain is broken links. Broken links can happen for several reasons, such as if the link is no longer available or if it's been changed and there was a mistake in transferring the URL. Also, it can be a challenge to identify broken links because they might not be apparent in the website's new location.
Broken links can cause problems because they usually prompt visitors to click on them before realizing that nothing will happen when they do so. Thus, it wastes their time as well as yours by making your site seem broken and less trustworthy than it should be.
3) Mismatched URLs
Mismatched URLs are another things you must consider when moving your website. When you move your site and change the URL structure, there might be links to existing pages on external websites which are no longer valid. For example, if a page were previously located at “/page-name” but changed to “example.com/page-url,” any links made from another website to the old URL would need to be updated to point to the new and correct one.
4) 404 Pages
Broken links trigger 404 pages. They are also one of the most common SEO issues after moving your website.
When you move your site, there's a chance that some of the old URLs still point to live content. It could confuse visitors, and they might end up on these pages rather than finding what they're looking for. Additionally, it affects SEO as it might result in people being sent to a page that doesn't have the content they're looking for.
The solution is simple: you need to go through every link on your website and make sure that it links back to an actual URL using 301 redirects before launching your new site.
Takeaways
With this list of SEO problems, you should be able to keep your site from being penalized and ranking lower. By doing so, you'll enjoy more traffic and possible ROIs.
