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SEO

Overview​

This document highlights discussions the CMS squad has had with JellyFish (JF) in regards to migrating content away from rapha.cc to content.rapha.cc. Topics include redirects, URL decisions, SEO meta data.

The focus of the migration from an SEO perspective is to be sure that Google and other search engines will find the same pages and content once the migration is done.

JellyFish Tips​

  1. If some old pages need to be removed for some reason and they have already been indexed and ranked by engines, their value and traffic can be saved by redirecting them to the most similar ones, knowing that this could affect the page's SEO scores and result in different rankings.
  2. Even with a real 1:1 migration, so a page with the exact same content and perfect redirections, rankings could change anyway because the engine will re-evaluate every page. Keeping content and images the same will mitigate any negative indexing issues. If the same content cannot be migrated, do not less content on the new pages as this negatively impacts SEO. Have greater amounts of content will not impact indexing in such a serious way.
  3. Keep any SEO tags (title, description, canonical, hrefLang)
  4. When using Next.js, avoid using empty <a></a> tags by ensuring you use a Link tag and when navigating links do not use router.push.
  5. Careful when using next.config.js for redirects, se below.

Next config file​

For Redirects and Rewrites, we do not recommend using the next.config.js file if possible, as having them managed with CloudFlare or within your CMS is a better option for SE

We are generally advising against using config.js if it will be used to contain a lot of 1 to 1 redirects (we are talking tens of thousands) because this could have a significant impact on website performances. We've been through this already with some brands and the risk is real. So, if you can manage to implement just a limited number of individual 1 to 1 redirects in your config.js file and use some general Next's pattern match rules to optimize redirections, then this would be okay. Just to give you an example, if you are going to implement Option A for your Story pages, then you'll have to use 1:1 redirects, as the new URL are not going to match the old ones with just a single rewriting rule. If these 1:1 redirects can be limited, let's say, below 10K, then everything should be fine, if we go a lot over that number we could run into performance issue.

Two redirection rules, built into the next application logic, isn't going to hinder your performance (run time speeds) so I'd suggest you do this the config.js file.

Information above is taken from email's with JellyFish.

Key Points​

  • Having lots of redirects (10,000+) in the config file can hinder runtime performance.
  • Keep path mapping simple, take this into consideration when determining new URLs. Taking a look at the proposal for story url's, it is advised we should use Option B as it does not introduce a new URL parameter into the redirect URL.