The site did not make a redirect mapping table, so why did the natural traffic drop by two or three tenths?
Why would there be a drop of two or three percentage points in natural traffic during the migration? Because what was migrated was not the content, but the address. External links, search engine indexes, and user bookmarks all point to the old address. If the new site does not correspond to these addresses one by one, both the request and the weight will fall on the expired page. In the industry, hasty migration often leads to a loss of two or three percentage points of natural traffic, and the scale is basically proportional to the number of missing entries.
Which part of the traffic has dropped?
Losses are concentrated on three types of pages: old articles with external links, stable list pages, and frequently visited product details. These three types have the common feature that the source of traffic does not depend on in-site navigation, but on addresses that have already been spread. After the address expires, users see an error or the homepage, and search engines consider the old pages to be unusable, while new pages need to accumulate trust again.
On the contrary, long-tail pages that only enter from in-site search and the homepage lose less, as users will follow the new structure. This is why the overall traffic appears to drop only slightly, but the most valuable part drops significantly.
How to list the corresponding table
The method is to match the old address item by item with the closest page in the new address, and permanently redirect to it, rather than pointing the entire path to the homepage in a general way. Each row in the table should at least contain: old address, new address, redirect type, whether it includes query parameters, and acceptance status.
Several disciplines:
- Semantic similarity is preferred. For old articles that have been taken down, redirect to the closest existing page on the same topic, and explain the change on the page, do not directly fall to the homepage.
- Parameters need to be handled. If addresses with filtering parameters are all redirected to the default form of the new list page, parameter information is lost; corresponding relationships should be retained for common parameters in the pseudo-static rules.
- Capitals and the end slash should be uniform. Having multiple entry addresses on the same page is equivalent to creating duplicate content.
The value of the reference table lies in its verifiability. After the migration is completed, access the old addresses one by one according to the table, and confirm that the return is a redirect instead of an error page. This step cannot rely on sampling.
Why control the chain redirect?
A jump from B to C, where B jumps to C, will cause the request to be cut off before reaching the destination. Search engine spiders have a limit on the number of jumps they can follow in a jump chain, and they will give up the request if the limit is exceeded, with the known public figure being about ten jumps; therefore, the safe practice is to let any old address directly lead to the final page in one step, compressing the chain into one jump.
There is also a second cost of chain jumps: external link updates are slow, the cycle of repeated references to old addresses is counted in years, and any revision in the middle of a longer chain may break the entire jump.
Site map and verification after migration
After the migration is completed, three follow-up tasks need to be done: regenerate and submit the sitemap to ensure the new address is discovered as soon as possible; retain the redirection of the old address for a long time, at least for one year, and the old addresses with external links should be retained indefinitely; also check whether the backup and recovery are available, in case the upgrade fails, there should be room to revert to the old version.
Do not submit addresses that return redirects or error states in the sitemap, as these entries will occupy crawling quotas and may also distort the verification results. After going online, the observation sequence is to first look at the click-through rate of the old addresses, then the inclusion volume of the new addresses, and finally the ranking fluctuations.
Common questions
Ask: If only the directory structure has been changed, do we still need to list the corresponding table item by item?Answer: Yes. Directory level prefix jump seems convenient, but it will be overlaid with the new path rules to form a chain jump, which has a high cost of investigation, and listing item by item can converge faster.
Ask: How long can the old address be stopped?Answer: At least one year; addresses that are still referenced externally or bring traffic should be retained for a long time, and the address should be confirmed to have no requests with logs before it is disabled.
Ask: What should I do if I haven't made the corresponding table and it has already fallen?Answer: First, supplement the list of old addresses according to the access logs and external link records, and then supplement the jump; after supplementing, resubmit the site map, and it usually takes several weeks to recover the collection.