Stein SetvikStein Setvik is a Technical Consultant with Forum One. This blog post originally appeared on the Forum One blog. 

Whenever you migrate your website, it’s easy to spoil your search rankings. Whether moving to Drupal from another CMS or a previous version of Drupal, there are a number of steps you can take to preserve your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Take a look at the steps and resources we've identified to help keep your site the top result for relevant searches.

Step 1: Minimize changes to key site and page attributes

Avoid making any changes to the following three during a migration:

Domain Name
Site Name
Page Titles

Step 2: Minimize 404 (page not found) errors

Reduce 404 errors as much you can. Ensure that all (or as many as possible) URLs on the old site use a 301 redirect to the same pages (or semantically-relevant pages) on the new site.

Step 3: Submit your migrated site to Google and Bing

Setup webmaster accounts with Google and Bing for your website.
When you re-launch your site on Drupal, use the XML sitemap module within Drupal to submit a new XML sitemap to Google and Bing.

Step 4: Inform sites that link to yours about any URL changes

Update links to your site on any web properties you own or have access to if the URLs of those links have changed during the migration (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogger, Wikipedia)
Ask websites to which you do not have access but that link to your site to update their links.

Step 5: Improve page load time

Once you have plans to accomplish the above steps, look for ways to improve the page load time of your website. Slow page load times can negatively affect your Google PageRank. Here are some steps to consider:

Consider switching your web server from Apache to the much faster NGINX + PHP-FPM combo.
Install APC to speed up the performance of PHP based CMSs
Install Varnish to cache your site pages. Varnish makes your site fly for visitors who are not logged in to Drupal.
Reduce the number of requests a visitor's browser must make to download your site. This means use CSS image sprites instead of separate icon images and turn on JavaScript and CSS aggregation in Drupal’s settings.
Use the drupal.org/project/jquery_update module to upgrade the version of jQuery and jQuery UI used on your website and have it served up from Google’s servers instead of your website server.

Resources

Key Drupal Modules to ease your Migration Page-rank woes.

Redirect: Provides a simple administration interface to manage old URLs and the new URLs they should redirect to.

XML Sitemap: Builds an XML sitemap of your site content and automatically submits it to Google, Bing, et al. on a regular basis. It will let the search engines know about changes to your site content and/or it’s location.

Metatag: Allows you to specify header metatags on each site page.

Global Redirect: Redirects Drupal's internal content paths, e.g. node/50, to the corresponding path alias, e.g. /blog/2012-01/10-steps-to-drupal-heaven
Modules to help with Data Migration

Migrate module: A powerful migration framework for getting content from non-Drupal CMSs into Drupal). Note: Be sure to execute migrations using Drush, not the Drupal administrative interface.

Drupal-to-Drupal Data Migration module: Built on top of the Migrate module described above, this module is specifically for migrating content from an old Drupal site (Drupal 5, Drupal 6, or Drupal 7) to a modern Drupal site (Drupal 7).
Additional Modules and Tools

Consider the following modules and tools as well:

Page Title: Allows you to specify on a page-by-page basis a different page title in <head></head> than the one in <body></body> (i.e. a different browser tab title from the page title that appears within the page).

Google Analytics: Gives you control over what pages and content are exposed to Google analytics.

SEO Checklist: Provides a visual checklist you can use to walk through all aspects of Drupal SEO you may want to consider.

Drupal SEOGrader: This tool, available with any Acquia Network Subscription, measures and optimizes your SEO configuration in real time.
Follow the above steps and you will be well on your way to keeping your Drupal site atop Google and Bing’s search engine rankings.

Comments

mikeryan’s picture

Just want to point out a couple of best practices when you're using the Migrate module to implement your site migration.

The simplest is, if the paths are well SEO-optimized to begin with, you can preserve them as-is by mapping them to 'path' in your Migration class:

$this->addFieldMapping('path', 'legacy_url');

Usually, though, especially in a migration from a foreign CMS, you will be taking the opportunity to reorganize your site structure and want your paths to reflect that structure - or, the paths were not well SEO-optimized (example.com/foo.asp?x=1234) and you want to change that in your Drupal instantiation. In that case, you will usually set up Pathauto patterns reflecting the structure you want (although preventing them from being applied while running the migration itself, because it will slow down the migration) and redirecting from the old paths to the fresh shiny Drupal paths:

// Disable pathauto during migration - run bulk pathauto updates afterwards
$this->addFieldMapping('pathauto')
->defaultValue(0);
$this->addFieldMapping('migrate_redirects', 'legacy_url');

IMPORTANT: To do this you need to patch the redirect module.

 

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RoloDMonkey’s picture

The Metatags module has the functionality of the Page Title built in. Don't turn on both, or they will conflict with each other.