Migrating to Drupal 8 is an increasingly popular decision among Drupal 7 website owners. This is explained by the benefits of Drupal 8, as well as the fact that migrating to D8 is the best way to prepare for Drupal 9.
Migration involves many aspects. Today, we will SEO Migration review one very important, but often overlooked aspect in digital marketing: SEO. Discover SEO best practices when planning a Drupal site migration to version 8.Upgrading Drupal 7 to 8: SEO Checklist for a Smooth Migration
Web page URL
Metadata and tags
Configuration and other important SEO elements
Website loading speed
Mobile adaptability
Drupal in SEO – Does it have benefits?
Before we start diving into the intricacies of migration and SEO, we want to answer one of the most popular questions from our customers: Is Drupal good for SEO? The answer is a definitive yes. Through the built-in and contributed Drupal SEO modules, your website can have everything for a better user experience and better SEO ranking in search engine results (SERPs):
meta tags for your content
Effective content iran phone number data categorization through taxonomy
proper url redirects
Useful analysis
Creating an XML Sitemap
creating robots.txt
Checking for broken links
real-time SEO tracking
and much more.
The difference in architecture between D7 and D8 has created a challenging Drupal upgrade path (although migrations have definitely become much easier nowadays). There are classic migration steps like creating a new D8 instance and moving content, users, and configuration to it. This is done through automation or recreated manually in some cases.
SEO-friendly descriptive page URLs
Options depend on the complexity of why Is crm important for agencies? the SEO migration, the amount of content, and more. For example, when you need to migrate content from Drupal 7, it may be more feasible to simply republish the nodes if there are fewer than 50.
In any case, SEO migration to Drupal 8 should be done with respect to SEO, otherwise several problems may arise. They can lead to losses in website traffic, SEO rankings, brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and conversions. Of course, no website owner wants this to happen, because they have invested their money, time, and effort to get it all through high-quality content.
Consider, for example, a very common SEO issue, such as broken links that appear if your pages have had their URLs changed during a careless content migration in Drupal. In this case:
Search engines find missing pages and lower your rankings
Users access your content through bookmarks and become disappointed
Backlinks to your site on third-party websites and social media are also broken
This sounds like a total SEO disaster! However, this is just one example – read on to find out more. This shows how important the role of an SEO expert is in a Drupal 8 website migration plan.
Drupal 8 SEO: The workflow of an SEO expert during a migration to Drupal 8
For SEO success during migration, an SEO expert must be involved from start to finish:
Conduct an SEO audit before migration to find out what needs to be improved, what brings the most value, what should definitely remain unchanged during migration, etc.
Review the content to see what needs to be rewritten or perhaps what outdated content needs to be removed.
Create SEO requirements for developers on what needs to be accomplished so they can use them as a guide to plan the necessary steps and choose the right tools.
Stay in touch throughout the migration agb directory so developers can consult the SEO expert with any questions that arise.
Thoroughly check the migration results in every SEO-related detail before deploying the new Drupal 8 website.
drupal-8-migration
The things needed to do differ from website to website and are based on your SEO audit. However, we have asked our SEO experts for a common Drupal migration checklist of important SEO issues to consider. Here goes:
Upgrading Drupal 7 to 8: SEO Checklist for a Smooth Migration
Web page URL
The website must be available to users at the same address that was used for Drupal 7. Be careful about redirecting from the WWW to the non-WWW version, as well as from the version with trailing slashes (https://my-website.com/ ). If the website uses HTTP, it is highly recommended to switch to HTTPS.
The structure and navigation of the website should be preserved if no changes are planned. It is recommended to stick to the same structure to avoid many problems with URLs.
All page URLs should be preserved (because even the slightest URL change can cause broken links!). If the website structure changes and you can’t keep the same URLs for some pages, perform 301 redirects for them. The Redirect module can take care of redirects to the new addresses.
The logic of adding new nodes in the future should also remain the same . The Pathauto module will help you generate new URLs according to the necessary logical patterns (e.g. your website/category/blog title).
You need a well-designed 404 page instead . If you want your website to search for some content instead of just displaying the 404 page, try the Search 404 Drupal module.
There is a recommendation to make all website URLs relative.
The use of the canonical tag should be preserved .
Provides a rel=”nofollow” attribute for external links.
Image URL paths used in content must be preserved.
Internal links must be preserved .
Metadata and tags
Meta tags and the way they are generated should be preserved . You can use the Metatag module to provide automatic generation of meta tags for content according to specified patterns.
