Website Architecture,Design & MigrationGuideSankar Ponnusamy, Priceline.com, Jan-2015

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to provide an easy-to-understand guide to website architecture, basicdesign guidelines and ecommerce SEO tips.

Basic SEO Guidelines For Web Developers

• Make pages primarily for users not for searchengines - Google

• Make site with a clear hierarchy and links.Every page should be reachable from atleast one static text link. HTML sitemap(consists of hierarchical listings of the pages)can be used to display the structure of thesite. HTML Sitemap is usually placed onthe footer so that the very deepest level ofcontent is reachable to the crawler within 3-4clicks, effectively flattening the site architecture.Nordstrom, has a well-optimized HTML sitemap.

Brand pages are hierarchically organized inalphabetical order

• Use Keywords to create descriptive, humanfriendly URL Structure If the content is ac-cessible throughout multiple ways implementa 301 redirect or rel=”canonical” attribute onthe duplicate URL(s).

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• What happens when a user removes part ofa URL? prepare site to show content in suchsituations or have a custom 404 page withlinks to other pages they might want to goto. In the below example removing ”table-lamps” from the url will take users to ”furniture”category.https://www.1stdibs.com/locations/new-york-usa/furniture/lighting/table-lamps/

• Ensure breadcrumb navigation is present.

• Apply the following best practice on page tem-plates: unique title, unique description, uniqueH1’s & Optimised alt tags

• Notify Google of mobile sites.

• Pay attention to product (Hotel Property) URLsRefer section 1.2

• Google is no longer indexing and ranking tabbedor click to expand contents. Here is an examplesof tabbed content from a major e-commerce site,which could be avoided. (**comment addedJune 2015, p.s refer to recent Google guidelines,as there is some changes on tabbed content)

Best Practice: Amazon display most of the usergenerated content directly on the page, makingthe user scroll to the end to see the content.

• Use schema markups and social media Opengraph protocols in the page template.

URL Structure Best Practices

Basics of A Good URL Structure

Fundamental success of a site and its seo dependson the URL structure. It is a common practice forecommerce websites to logically organize its pagesinto categories, sub-categories and product levelpages. Example:Root: www.example.comCategory page: www.example.com/category-nameSub-category: www.example.com/category-name/sub-category-nameProduct page: Requires different approach.

*discussed under Product URL Structure sectionbelow*Categories and sub-categories are the most impor-tant pages of the site and thus, will be targetingimportant keyword terms.

Another popular way of site architec-ture is to show the full user path: Ex-amples: 1stdibs.com/locations/new-york-usa/furniture/lighting/homeaway.com/vacation-rentals/new-york/upstate-new-york/r413

Product URL Structure

Product pages are different from category pages.These pages need a special consideration, as sameproduct can exist in multiple categories creatingduplicate content issues.For Example: ”Pink Nike Women’s Torch”can exist in the following two categorieswww.example.com/women/shoes/pink-nike-womens-torch or www.example.com/nike/pink-nike-womens-torch

Another example: ”Sumner Hotel” in Brooklynarea can exist in Brooklyn or Downtown Brooklynor Bronx category pages then we could endup with 3 urls serving the same content.www.example.com/hotels/brooklyn/sumner-hotelswww.example.com/hotels/bronx/sumner-hotelswww.example.com/hotels/downtown-brooklyn/sumner-hotels

In this scenario, it’s best to use canonical tags,explained in section below

Recommended Ways Of Combating This

One URL per product coming directly from the rootlevelwww.example.com/sumner-hotels-brooklynorwww.example.com/pink-nike-womens-torch

One URL per product coming from category pagewww.example.com/hotels/sumner-hotels-brooklynorwww.example.com/product/pink-nike-womens-torch

Regardless of which path the user takes to theproduct page, the breadcrumb could still showthe path they took to aid user experience, i.e.breadcrumb will behome>hotels>us>brooklyn>sumner-hotels

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home>hotels>us>bronx>sumner-hotelshome>hotels>us>downtown-brooklyn>sumner-hotels respectively.

Site Migration Guidelines:

What exactly is going to change in the redesign?

• Is there any front-end design changes associatedwith the migration?

• What about code base? Is it going to change ?

• Focus on information architecture and/or pageURL Structure. URL structure change requiresa proper 301 redirect strategy.

• Content: Migrate most of the content from thelegacy site to its equivalent new counter part.For instance, /old-page-abc may have valuabletext content which could be transfered over to/new-page-abc

• Internal Links: Maintain legacy sites internallinking structure.With a change this big, temporary rankings andtraffic declines are likely. keeping this in mind,elect a best time for the migration to happen.

Migration Process

Collect Data And Establish SEO Baselines

Step 1. Crawl the existing legacy site to generatea list of URLs that can be used to test redirectsif/when the URL format changes.

Step 2. A crawl of all the external backlinks willgenerate a list of linked URLs.

Step 3. A crawl of the new website on a stagingenvironment can be compared to the live website.The reports will highlight any technical issues withthe new website in addition to highlighting anychanges in the site architecture.

Step 4: Launch and post-migration Monitoring.After the big day, it is important to monitor Googlescrawl and organic traffic.

New Site Development

Block Crawler access:

Make sure that the test environment is not accessibleto search bots.

• Block the test dev via robots.txtAdd the following code on robots.txt:

User−Agent : ∗Disallow : /Test−server−name

• Remember, search engines can still crawl thesite and possibly index the new URLS. So,password protect the test environment or onlyallow access to certain IP ranges.

• As a third layer protection, add meta robotsnoindex to all pages.

metaname = ”robots”content = ”noindex”

Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content issues should be identified andresolved as early as possible. Common cases includes:1. Internal search generating duplicate pages underdifferent URLs.2. URLs with added parameters after the ?character. (URL parameters such as click trackingand some analytics code can cause duplicate contentissues).3. Directories with and without a trailing slashexample: priceline.com/hotels should be redirectedto priceline.com/hotels/

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Page by Page 301 Mapping

This is the heart of our migration progress from anSEO standpoint. Make sure legacy site pages 301redirect to their newer counterparts.

Assuming the new URL Structure to reflectsthe path user took: prieline.com/hotels/us/new-york/brooklynHere is the page by page url mapping looks like

Example: Mayoclinic.com moved to the .org TLD inJan 2014. Here is the redirect path

Crawling And Comparing Test vsLive Site, using Deepcrawl

Using DeepCrawl (a 3rd party site crawler) crawlthe new development environment and compare itwith the legacy site. Make sure there is no differencein data between the development and the live site.Such difference will impact SEO rankings. Makesure the internal linking structure remains the same.Figure below, illustrates Example dash-baord comparing live vs test site:

Handling XML Sitemaps:

Generate New XML sitemaps containing new pages.Submit new XML sitemaps to Google & Bing viaWebmaster toolsKeep old XML sitemap to track indexed pages,expected to decrease

Site Goes Live: Checklists

Make sure 301 redirects workCheck webmaster tools for other source code errors.Monitor webmaster tools or crawl errors such as 404,soft 404, 302 etc.Make sure the analytics code installed on all pagesand tracking.Make sure PPC container tags & other affiliates tagsare installed.Monitor changes in organic rankings, traffic and con-versions

1 Reference

http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-content-strategy/five-seo-tips-for-product-pages-on-ecommerce-websites/http://us.searchlaboratory.com/blog/2012/10/basic-site-structure-click-depth-for-seo/

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http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-editionhttp://builtvisible.com/solving-site-architecture-issues/ http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo.htmhttps://developers.google.com/apisdeepcrawl.co.uk/use-cases/site-redevelopment http://builtvisible.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/A4uExpo-Architecture-Richard-Baxter.pdf// image source: DeepCrawl.com

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