SEJ Summit 2015: Upgrade Your Platform Without Sacrificing Your Rankings by Carolyn Shelby
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Transcript of SEJ Summit 2015: Upgrade Your Platform Without Sacrificing Your Rankings by Carolyn Shelby
Sebastian Wenzel, Webanalyticsbook
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#SEJSummit#Searchmetrics
• Technical background, SEO, coder, speaker, trainer
• 20 year veteran of the industry
• Currently with Tribune Publishing and oversees
SEO on LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun,
and 5 other daily newspapers.
@cshel
• Some sitemaps stopped populating correctly
• Bots seemed to have a much harder time crawling the content (discovery)
• Text to Code ratios were not nearly as good
• Fancy way of delivering images does use <img> tags.
• Infinite scroll was accommodated, but fragile
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
ApplicationLayer
PresentationLayer
Session Layer
Transport Layer
Network Layer
Data Link Layer
Physical Layer
Application
Data Transport
• Have a current list of all of your pages (full site crawl)
• Have a current list of all of your inbound links
• Awesome links, keep those pages or redirect
• Horrid links? 404 those URLs.
• Know where the traffic is going on your website
• Make sure you know what functionality MUST be maintained (talk to other
departments)
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• Will the rendered output maintain SEO best practices?
• H1s in the right places
• Use widely accepted HTML/HTML5 practices
• Maintain existing microformats/schema
• Generally not change anything in a stupid way?
• Will it still be crawlable? As crawlable?
• Will the things that need to be done eventually get done now?
• Responsive? Mobile-friendly? Https?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• Are the URLs going to change?
• How much? In what way? Will it be logical and easy to handle?
• How can we manage redirects?
• Are the paths to the images changing?
• Image search
• Are existing optimizations pulling through? Need to be redone?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• Are all of the tracking/analytics scripts going to still work? Need to be
replaced?
• Are we testing page load times? Server speed? Site speed in general?
• Are we load testing?
• What’s happening to the old database? What’s happening to the old database
data?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• If we’re changing hosting providers, is our email going to catastrophically break?
• If we change our master zone file for DNS, are there any subdomains that we need
to not accidentally destroy?
• What kinds of things are needed for the site to be successful, but are being
overlooked?
• Sitemaps? Landing Pages? API people still use?
• Is anyone remembering the robots.txt?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• Is the UI changing so much that content producers will not be able to perform their
jobs without training?
• Is the UI changing in any minor, but incredibly important way, that people might
overlook something REALLY important?
• What other training things need to happen?
• Are we taking advantage of opportunities to eliminate or minimize human error?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• Failure to address widespread URL changes
• Failure to address user behaviors and needs in favor of flashy new “cutting edge”
design
• Loss of existing optimizations, need to redo them
• Failure to speed and load test
• Failure to remove the noindex from the new site
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel
• Engines don’t care about your fancy back-end, they care about the rendered output.
• Do not sacrifice page speed and load times on the altar of Pretty and Shiny.
• *SO* cutting edge that the users can’t figure out how to use it defeats the purpose. Don’t
alienate the users.
Remember
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel