SEJ Summit 2015: Upgrade Your Platform Without Sacrificing Your Rankings by Carolyn Shelby

Sebastian Wenzel, Webanalyticsbook

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Instant data. Tweak

strategies. Benchmark

competitors.

#SEJSummit#Searchmetrics

• Technical background, SEO, coder, speaker, trainer

• 20 year veteran of the industry

• Currently with Tribune Publishing and oversees

SEO on LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun,

and 5 other daily newspapers.

@cshel

Responsive!Super Fast!Modular!

BEAUTIFUL!

Won a Design Award!

• Some sitemaps stopped populating correctly

• Bots seemed to have a much harder time crawling the content (discovery)

• Text to Code ratios were not nearly as good

• Fancy way of delivering images does use <img> tags.

• Infinite scroll was accommodated, but fragile

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@cshel

ApplicationLayer

PresentationLayer

Session Layer

Transport Layer

Network Layer

Data Link Layer

Physical Layer

Application

Data Transport

• Have a current list of all of your pages (full site crawl)

• Have a current list of all of your inbound links

• Awesome links, keep those pages or redirect

• Horrid links? 404 those URLs.

• Know where the traffic is going on your website

• Make sure you know what functionality MUST be maintained (talk to other

departments)

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#Searchmetrics

@cshel

• Will the rendered output maintain SEO best practices?

• H1s in the right places

• Use widely accepted HTML/HTML5 practices

• Maintain existing microformats/schema

• Generally not change anything in a stupid way?

• Will it still be crawlable? As crawlable?

• Will the things that need to be done eventually get done now?

• Responsive? Mobile-friendly? Https?

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@cshel

• Are the URLs going to change?

• How much? In what way? Will it be logical and easy to handle?

• How can we manage redirects?

• Are the paths to the images changing?

• Image search

• Are existing optimizations pulling through? Need to be redone?

#SEJSummit

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@cshel

• Are all of the tracking/analytics scripts going to still work? Need to be

replaced?

• Are we testing page load times? Server speed? Site speed in general?

• Are we load testing?

• What’s happening to the old database? What’s happening to the old database

data?

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#Searchmetrics

@cshel

• If we’re changing hosting providers, is our email going to catastrophically break?

• If we change our master zone file for DNS, are there any subdomains that we need

to not accidentally destroy?

• What kinds of things are needed for the site to be successful, but are being

overlooked?

• Sitemaps? Landing Pages? API people still use?

• Is anyone remembering the robots.txt?

#SEJSummit

#Searchmetrics

@cshel

• Is the UI changing so much that content producers will not be able to perform their

jobs without training?

• Is the UI changing in any minor, but incredibly important way, that people might

overlook something REALLY important?

• What other training things need to happen?

• Are we taking advantage of opportunities to eliminate or minimize human error?

#SEJSummit

#Searchmetrics

@cshel

• Failure to address widespread URL changes

• Failure to address user behaviors and needs in favor of flashy new “cutting edge”

design

• Loss of existing optimizations, need to redo them

• Failure to speed and load test

• Failure to remove the noindex from the new site

#SEJSummit

#Searchmetrics

@cshel

• Engines don’t care about your fancy back-end, they care about the rendered output.

• Do not sacrifice page speed and load times on the altar of Pretty and Shiny.

• *SO* cutting edge that the users can’t figure out how to use it defeats the purpose. Don’t

alienate the users.

Remember

#SEJSummit

#Searchmetrics

@cshel

Twitter @cshel

Linkedin linkedin.com/in/cshel

Google+ +CarolynShelby

#SEJSummit

#Searchmetrics

@cshel