Fixing Broken Links & Ensuring Crawlability
Website migration, whether for a redesign, domain change, or platform switch, can introduce a variety of challenges. One of the most common issues that arise is broken links, which can harm both the user experience and SEO performance. Additionally, ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your new site is critical to preserving your organic traffic and rankings.
In this article, we’ll explore strategies for fixing broken links and ensuring crawlability during a website migration, to ensure a smooth transition that minimizes SEO disruptions.
Why Broken Links & Crawlability Matter
Broken links (404 errors) occur when users or search engines try to access a page that no longer exists or has been moved without a proper redirect. These errors can negatively impact the user experience by leading visitors to dead-end pages and can hurt SEO performance by signaling to search engines that your site is not properly maintained.
Crawlability, on the other hand, refers to the ability of search engines to navigate and index your website’s pages. If search engines can’t crawl your site effectively, it can result in important pages being missed, which may affect your rankings and organic traffic.
During a migration, issues like broken links, missing pages, or blocked pages can easily arise, but they can be prevented with careful planning, proper redirects, and thorough testing.
Step 1: Identify Broken Links
The first step in fixing broken links is identifying them. Fortunately, several tools can help you detect broken links on your site before and after migration. Some common tools include:
Screaming Frog: This SEO tool crawls your website and generates a report of broken links, missing pages, and other issues related to your site’s structure.
Google Search Console: The Crawl Errors section of Google Search Console will notify you of 404 errors and other crawl issues on your site.
Ahrefs: Ahrefs Site Audit Tool can crawl your site and flag any broken links, as well as provide suggestions for fixing them.
Dead Link Checker: A free tool to scan your website for broken links quickly.
Once you identify the broken links, make sure to record the URLs, as these will need to be redirected or fixed during the migration process.
Step 2: Set Up 301 Redirects
One of the most important steps in ensuring that your site is crawlable and SEO-friendly after migration is setting up proper 301 redirects. A 301 redirect tells search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new location, passing the SEO value (link equity) from the old page to the new one.
How to Implement 301 Redirects:
Create a URL Mapping Document: Before migration, create a mapping of all old URLs to their new counterparts. This will ensure you don’t miss any redirects.
Set Up Redirects for Broken Links: If you have pages that no longer exist, but you still want to send traffic to related content, you can set up redirects to the most relevant page.
Test Redirects: After you’ve set up redirects, test them using tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, or a browser extension to make sure they work as intended.
Avoid Redirect Chains: Make sure that you don’t create multiple redirects in a chain, as this can lead to slow load times and poor user experience. Always aim for a direct redirect from the old URL to the new one.
Proper 301 redirects will ensure that both users and search engines are directed to the right page, preserving link equity and helping to avoid any negative SEO consequences.
Step 3: Ensure Proper Crawlability
Search engines rely on a website’s crawlability to understand its structure and index its pages. If your site is not crawlable, important pages may be missed by search engines, leading to a drop in rankings and organic traffic.
To ensure crawlability during a website migration, follow these steps:
1. Update the Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file controls which pages and sections of your site search engines are allowed to crawl. During migration, it's important to ensure that your robots.txt file is configured correctly and doesn’t block important pages.
Allow search engines to crawl your key pages: Make sure that the robots.txt file is not blocking any critical pages, such as the homepage, important blog posts, or product pages.
Disallow irrelevant sections: Use the robots.txt file to block search engines from crawling areas of your site that are not valuable for indexing, such as admin pages or duplicate content.
For example, a basic robots.txt configuration might look like this:
This configuration allows all search engines to crawl the site’s public pages but blocks them from accessing the admin or cart pages.
2. Create and Submit a New XML Sitemap
Your XML sitemap provides search engines with a list of all important pages on your site. If your URL structure has changed during migration, you will need to generate a new sitemap that reflects the updated URLs.
Generate a new XML sitemap: After updating your site, use tools like Screaming Frog, Yoast SEO (for WordPress), or Google Search Console to generate a new sitemap.
Submit your new sitemap to search engines: Submit the updated sitemap through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to help search engines crawl your updated site more effectively.
3. Check for Crawl Errors in Google Search Console
After the migration, check Google Search Console for any crawl errors. If search engines are unable to access certain pages, you will see errors in the “Coverage” section. These errors could include 404s, server errors, or issues with URLs.
Fix any crawl errors: If you see crawl errors for important pages, address them immediately by ensuring that the URLs are correctly redirected or accessible.
Review indexation status: Use Google Search Console to track which pages are being indexed. If certain pages are not indexed, you may need to check the robots.txt file, meta tags, or other settings to ensure that they are not blocked.
Step 4: Test Crawlability on a Staging Site
Before making the migration live, it’s a good idea to test the crawlability of your new site on a staging environment. This allows you to identify any issues and fix them before they affect the live site.
Crawl the staging site: Use crawling tools like Screaming Frog to simulate a search engine crawl of the staging version of your site. This will help you catch any broken links, blocked pages, or technical issues that may affect SEO.
Test redirects: Make sure that all redirects are set up properly in the staging environment before migrating the live site.
Step 5: Ongoing Monitoring & Maintenance
After the migration is complete, continuous monitoring is crucial to ensure that broken links are fixed, crawlability is maintained, and SEO performance is optimized.
Monitor your traffic: Keep an eye on organic traffic and keyword rankings after the migration. Any significant drops in traffic or rankings should be investigated immediately to identify potential issues.
Check for 404 errors regularly: Use tools like Google Search Console or third-party monitoring tools to check for broken links and fix them promptly.
Revisit the robots.txt and XML sitemap files: If you add new pages or change your site structure again in the future, be sure to update your robots.txt file and XML sitemap accordingly.
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