The Project

Working in partnership with drpdigital Essential Marketer was asked to provide a website migration service to one of their clients – Worcester Bosch.

The Worcester Bosch UK site had been continually added to over many years. The client wanted to modernise their site but were advised that changing their site could affect the site’s search presence. Being a well known household name, the Worcester Bosch UK site had a huge presence in Google.

The Solution

Initial analysis indicated well over 250,000 elements that needed managing ahead of the migration. These included images, current pages, redirects and duplication. On top of this there were huge canonicalization problems to overcome with four different versions of the site running side by side.

Once the canonicalisation was fixed we then ran our website migration tool again. From this analysis we were able to produce our plan to begin the vast project; to date this is the largest migration project we have managed.

New vs Old

When everything had been successfully dealt with, we compared the live site with the development site. This process was repeated time and again until we were entirely satisfied that we had dealt with every important page that had any bearing on the continued presence in search engine once the new site was launched.

Due to the sheer size and volume of the site this process took six months to complete which fitted in with the relaunch schedule.

Launch

Launch day arrived and, for the first week after the launch Google listed both the brand new URLs from the new site as well as the old ones which were listed directly underneath. This fact alone shows the strength of our migration service; what it proves is that if you do it right, you are immediately passing credibility to any new URLS or page. It takes Google time to fully understand what’s been done to the site – you have to give it time to evaluate and track it.