SEO when changing CMS or page structure

What SEO steps should be followed to prevent negative impact when changing CMS and/or site structure ?

This subject will be divided on the following sections:

1. My scenario
2. SEO steps when designing the new website
   
   • SEO and social media integration
   • Ajax and SEO
3. The results
4. How We did it
• SEO: Changing CMS
• SEO: Changing site structure
5. Putting the website online

My scenario

This section introduces the reason for changing the website structure and the CMS and isn't required to understand the technical steps taken.

I was hired by a consulting company called Kaizen Institute Consulting Group and my main goal was to turn an outdated website in a clean, well designed and easy to manage system. At the time, all countries were using a TYPO3 instance as the CMS of choice and because I was fresh out from college and didn't know much about the system I started studying it.

After several experiments, reading a lot of documentation and talking with typo3 users I understood the following:

If your goal is to have a responsive, flexible, feature rich and customized website then forget TYPO3. The documentation is awful, it's based on one of the most stupid scripting languages (typo script, which basically forces you to memorize non-logical stuff) and has a terrible customization architecture based on extensions.

The only scenario I see typo3 to be an option is for multi-language websites (based on a sub domain approach), where most of the pages are static and the main goal is to display non-Ajax content.

But for our website we had ambitious requirements:

• Rich online event booking system that would allow each country to specify different forms for their participants with deep Ajax filtering options and connection with our existing booking management system
• Online payment system
• A complex success stories data base
• Complete control of the crawlable HTML code
• Effective spam controlling

When we start understanding the hours required to study and implement this using TYPO3 extension system, Kaizen Institute IT Leader had the courage to say "We need to drop typo3 and go with something different. Let's build our own CMS". This was at a time when I actually had a redesigned and improved version of the website running on an updated TYPO3 instance which took approx a month of development and deadlines were around the corner. So, without a moment to lose we started developing a new CMS tailored to our needs but flexible enough that would be easy to add new features.

After one month and a half, we had a custom backed CMS and a fronted. It's worth mentioning that we are a two man team and while I ended up implementing most of the system, due to improvements that needed to be made on our internal project managing system of which my colleague was considerable savvier than me, my time wasn't dedicated only to development as I had to provide support to the 25 counties Kaizen Institute has offices in, which amounts to 400+ employees.

Because we were aiming for global standard content that would be localized by each country, it was time to align the different visions from each country regarding the website content. When we finished implementing the improvements it was time to submit to the multiple search engines and hope we had done a solid SEO job.

SEO steps when designing the new website

SEO steps have flooded the internet and most of them give you pretty straight forward directives but don't seem to be supported by actual facts, being, in my opinion, just someone's else opinion. So I've put together a SEO list based on facts.

Then I follow a SEO checklist in order to create search engine optimized content, which is based in my opinion, what I've read and common sense.

SEO and social media integration

Although social media linking isn't as powerful as a reference from a reputable web site, it helps "spread the word" and improve branding. As such, and because we would have a couple of douzen countries creating content for the website, we wanted to harvest all that content and share it with others through social media, more precisely twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Optimizing social media posting through scheduling

Until then I was the main responsible for handling Kaizen twitter and Facebook accounts, every time we had some relevant news like events promotions or global benchmark tours I'd posted it. There was one issue though, because I wasn't on the same time region as many of our potential clients, the posts weren't' being shared at the optimal time (target group was sleeping).

To fix this issue I started using the social media scheduling app called "bufferap" which allowed me to set when my posts should actually be posted on the social media networks. I set my posting schedule based on this study.

I wanted to give the same option to our CMS users, this way they could add a new Kaizen Institute success story to the website at 2 in the morning but instead of being lost among other posts during the night it would "freshly" popup at 8 am during a potential client breakfast twitter reading.

So we added this feature to the CMS. Whenever an user adds a news to the website it only takes a click on the option "share" to send it to Facebook, twitter or linked in (a preview is displayed to the user and the twitter version is shorten). During the content preview the user has the option to share it immediately or saving it on the "buffer" to be posted later. This feature was implemented using bufferapp's straight forward api.

Ajax and SEO

We added a rather complex but intuitive lean events calendar which is filtered and then update by Ajax.

Ajax is great for fast and real time behavior but has the downside of not being as SEO friendly as static content. So we wanted to achieve two things when using Ajax:

• Give a faster and more app-like experience
• Keep history behavior. 

Ajax browser history mean that three things needed to happen when a user would, for example, change the Lean Events filter type to only display tours:

1. The URL would change to the same state as if the user wasn't requesting by Ajax
2. The content was loaded dynamicly using Ajax
3. If the user pressed the browser back button it should take him to the state before applying the refered filter

To achieve this we used jQuery Address and it was applied in our success stories list and our events calendar (try changing the filters or browsing the success stories and then hitting the browser back button).

SEO Results

Our main goal was to redesign the website by giving it a more professional, global, clean and fresh look. So we came from this:

Kaizen Institute Website Old Layout

to this:

But we wanted to keep and if possible even improve the website visits.

When making a drastic change like ours and considering a lot of our traffic comes from organic search, it's normal for the hits to decrease but it in our case they actually increased and considerably (we made the transition on the morning of September 18th).

The visits:

Our visits increased about 57% and added to that the bounce rate also improved:

The bonce rate (lower is better):

Our bonce rate went from 73.24% to 47.8% meaning people would visit more pages inside our website instead of leaving it.

Pages / Visit

Our pages per visit went from 1.73 to 5.74 in the day of moving.

In my opinion this means we took the necessary SEO steps to at least allow the website improvements to overcome any negative search index impact.

How we did it?

SEO and changing CMS

Changing CMS, if done properly, shouldn’t have a negative impact in search ranking. The following guidelines are what to expect for a Search Engine friendly CMS:

Customizable page title, page description and menu names. The user should have full control over the page title and description meta tags

URLs Customization. Having keyword rich URLs is a good SEO practice and as such the CMS should allow to define a page’s url. It’s better to have www.kaizen.com/about-us/kaizen-institute.html then www.kaizen.com/index.php?id=22.

The HTML generated by the CMS should be clean and compliant to the W3C standard (valid html).

A considerable plus would be allowing to highlight data throught the schema.org rich snipets (more info). In our case we used it to mark our Lean Events

SEO and changing Website Structure

Ok this is the tricky part. First things first, changing website structure will have search index impact and you should do it if you are sure it’s a needed improvement and that in the long run it's a better fit for your business. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying this is not a decision to take lightly (SEO wise) and as such it should be done with commitment in mind, not something that will be changed every other month.

The goal of these steps is to prevent a simple but critical event, the 404 error. When you change the website structure Google might show a search result with an URL to a page that either doesn't exist anymore or has a new URL. If the user follows that link a page giving the “Not found” error is displayed and Google eventually will also get the same error when refreshing its index. When that happens the page is removed from Google’s index and all the page rank owned by that now extinct page will be lost, resulting in a decreased search index position.

The steps we took were the following:

1. Write down the fundamental structure of the new website
2. Check in Google analytics the top visited pages in the present website
3. From those see if it makes sense to include them in the new structure. If some of the old pages really attract a lot of hits then consider at least keeping them at the beginning and then phase them out.
4. Check with Google analytics or another tool the most famous back links (referrals) and take note of the ones that were removed and shouldn't be part of the new structure.
5. If possible change the referral URLs. All of the back links pointing to your website should be changed to the new URL if possible (which usually isn’t).
6. Do 301 permanent redirects. The previous steps were in preparation for this one, all of the URLs that aren't part of the new structure should return a HTTP 301 header with the new URL. This tells search engine that the content on that page was moved permanently to a new URL, so instead of getting a 404 error Google thinks “the content isn't gone it just changed pages”. Based in Matt Cuts videos, 301 shouldn't have a negative impact in page rank compared to normal links.
   I.E: if you access www.kaizen.com/kaizen-events.html the browser will be redirected to www.kaizen.com/events.html due to a 301 response.
7. Parse the website for link errors. Use a tool like Xenu which gives a report about links that are pointing to un-existing pages.

At the this point the new structure should go live. If the new website is on a new server then change the DNS and lower the TTL (time to leave).

It's now time to ask Google to crawl the website and check if it's accessing the new structure. To do that login into webmaster tools and chose the option "Cawl - Fetch as Google"and take a look into the resulting HTML. Take the opportunity to submit to Google index.

To speed up Google knowledge about the website consider submitting a sitemap, the recommended schema is to have it under www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.

Do the same for Microsoft Bing and that's it.

So to summarize the crucial steps of changing a website structure are:

• Consider the possibly of keeping the most "famous" links
• 301 extinct or moved links, at least the crucial ones
• Check for broken links
• Submit to webmaster tools and check regularly for errors

If you have any questions please let me know through the comments section.