#the nodebb thing

[bf-rally]

hitting a snag that may or may not be huge oh naurrrr

[michaelandy101-blog]

The New Moz website positioning Q&A: 100Ok URL Migration Case Examine

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/the-new-moz-seo-qa-100k-url-migration-case-study/

The New Moz website positioning Q&A: 100Ok URL Migration Case Examine

The creator’s views are solely his or her personal (excluding the unlikely occasion of hypnosis) and will not all the time replicate the views of Moz.

Do you have to all the time count on a site visitors drop throughout a web site/URL migration, even a short lived one?

In case you did not discover, Moz not too long ago launched a shiny new website positioning Q&A platform for all of the world to see, discover, and use to find out about website positioning.

Initially launched as a personal function for Professional members a few years in the past, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing again in 2011.

Within the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts masking each website positioning matter possible, and tens of thousands and thousands of web page views. For a very long time, a good portion of Moz’s natural site visitors got here from the Q&A.

Sadly, although, as usually occurs, over time the Q&A noticed critical neglect. Because of this:

The platform collected a ton of technical debt, making it almost unimaginable to replace

Pages loaded so slowly many customers gave up solely

Spam turned increasingly widespread

Moderation instruments had been outdated, and could not sustain

For these causes, two predictable issues occurred:

The Q&A turned much less helpful and satisfying to customers

Over time, site visitors dropped considerably

So Moz had a alternative: enhance the Q&A instantly, or kill it.

Fortunately, we select to enhance it.

Working with the unbelievable workforce at NodeBB (extremely really helpful, by the way in which), we rapidly spun up a brand new Q&A utilizing our present database, however with solely fashionable know-how on the entrance and backend.

Why this migration was difficult

We had been underneath intense time constraints. What would possibly usually take months, we would have liked to perform in a few weeks. This introduced distinctive challenges from an website positioning perspective.

The most important problem? Our complete URL construction wanted to alter. (If we had extra time, we may have averted this, however it was a luxurious we did not have.)

That meant we would have liked emigrate hundreds of URLs that regarded like this:

The migration additionally included all of Moz’s consumer profiles, which quantity within the lots of of hundreds. To be honest, a lot of the consumer profiles aren’t truly listed.

Regardless, this was an enormous migration!

The opposite potential purple flag was that a lot of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not thought-about a finest website positioning apply! We may’ve applied an answer for server-side rendering, however once more, we merely did not have time. We had been involved Google would have bother rendering the content material, and this would possibly tank our rankings (extra on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To drag off this enormous migration whereas minimizing the danger of site visitors loss, we adopted primary website positioning web site migration finest practices, together with just a few “special” extras for an added increase.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To place it merely, the way you implement your 301 redirects is both going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was truly the best, most easy a part of the job, as we’ve a number of expertise with web site migrations! (Does anybody keep in mind seomoz.org?)

We made a listing of each attainable URL and URL path. It is superb what number of URLs and patterns you would possibly miss. crawler is important to assist with this to be sure you remember something. For Moz, we had been in a position to accomplish this with knowledge from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our personal Moz Professional web site crawl.

We mapped each URL to its corresponding URL on the brand new NodeBB platform. Whereas we discovered many edge circumstances, this was comparatively easy.

We made positive to redirect every thing by way of 301. That is essential as a result of many platforms and builders could use 302s by default. Whereas Google has instructed us that they go PageRank equally via 302s and 301s, Google has additionally indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Talking of canonicalization, we additionally ran crawls of the brand new URL buildings utilizing the NodeBB platform. In situations the place we discovered URL paths that did not match our outdated patterns or we thought had been extraneous, the NodeBB workforce was in a position to simply arrange canonicalization patterns to keep away from Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Most sitemap administration

A key a part of our migration technique was sitemap administration. This concerned two steps:

1. Previous URLs: We already had sitemaps of all of the outdated URLs in place. Importantly, we stored these sitemaps stay and registered in Search Console. This manner, Google would proceed to crawl the outdated URLs and “see” the redirects.

Usually, site owners make the error of eradicating sitemaps too early, which can trigger a lower in crawl charge by Google. This implies it may doubtlessly take longer for Google to course of the redirects.

Sitemaps aren’t an ideal assure that Google will go to all of your outdated URLs, however they do present a touch. In actual fact, we nonetheless had a number of thousand URLs after a number of months that Google nonetheless hadn’t visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, with out the sitemaps of the outdated URLs, the difficulty may have taken for much longer.

2. New URLs: Our outdated sitemaps had been grouped into lists of 50,000 every — the utmost allowed by Google. There’s some suggestion within the website positioning group that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can truly enhance crawling effectivity.

Thankfully, NodeBB allowed us to construct smaller sitemaps by default, in order that’s precisely what we did. As an alternative of 2-Three sitemaps with tens of hundreds of URLs, we now had 130 particular person XML sitemaps, usually with not more than 500 URLs every.

Three. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I discussed earlier, the outdated Q&A had over 60,000 particular person posts constructed up over 10 years.

Inevitably, numerous these posts had been very low high quality. We suspected each the low high quality of the posts, together with poor consumer expertise, could possibly be inflicting Google to rank us decrease.

Once more, time constraints meant we could not do a full content material pruning audit. Thankfully, NodeBB got here to the rescue once more (that is beginning to sound like an advertorial — I swear it isn’t!) and ran all 60,000 posts via their spam plugin to take away the obvious, low-quality offenders.

In whole, we eliminated over 10,000 posts.

We didn’t redirect these URLs, and easily allow them to 404 after the migration. Nobody appeared to overlook them.

FYI: one other glorious useful resource on content material pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

four. Higher inner linking & consumer expertise

Though we had been porting over the identical content material and primary design, the migration introduced a terrific alternative to enhance consumer expertise. To perform this, we made two tiny tweaks to the general UX:

Added breadcrumbs all through the app

Added extremely related “related questions” within the sidebar

The outdated Q&A had neither of those options. Customers who landed on a query had no choices to discover different questions. Because of this, we suffered for years with a frustratingly excessive bounce charge and poor web site engagement metrics.

Outcomes: Earlier than and after the migration

To be sincere, I’ve by no means seen a migration fairly like this. Having carried out many migrations, I did my finest to arrange everybody for the most definitely situation: be ready for a 15-30% dip in site visitors for 1-Three months whereas Google processes all of the URLs.

In fact, nothing even near that occurred.

As you’ll be able to see within the chart beneath, we truly noticed a rise in site visitors, almost beginning at day one.

In actual fact, within the two months after the migration, natural Google site visitors to Q&A pages was up almost 19% in contrast with site visitors to all different pages.

What induced this rapid raise in site visitors? Was it the improved sitemap protection, the higher inner linking, or one thing else?

We merely do not know for positive, however we do have a touch.

As quickly as we launched the brand new Q&A, engagement numbers shot via the roof:

Increased time on web site

Decrease bounce charge

Extra pages per session

Briefly, customers gave the impression to be a lot happier and extra engaged with the brand new expertise.

May the improved consumer engagement have helped rankings?

Once more, we do not know. Google is reasonably tight-lipped about the way it could or could not use consumer click on alerts for rating functions, however we do have our suspicions.

Transferring to the longer term

We’re nonetheless persevering with to enhance the Q&A expertise. Most notably, we’re working to prioritize pace enhancements, particularly in gentle of Google’s work round Core Internet Vitals.

Regardless, this was positively a pleasant migration the place we did not expertise a site visitors drop — not even for a single day!

Maybe for those who vastly enhance your consumer expertise, web site structure, and website positioning finest practices, migrations would possibly truly result in a fast web win.

Source link

[gamebazu]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

https://ift.tt/3AOetEY

[noithatotoaz]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[kjt-lawyers]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[xaydungtruonggia]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[epackingvietnam]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[nutrifami]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[gamebazu]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[camerasieunhovn]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[ductrungnguyen87]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[thanhtuandoan89]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[drummcarpentry]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

[lakelandseo]

The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study

Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

Spam became more and more common

Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.) That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

Higher time on site

Lower bounce rate

More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.