Event: SEJ Summit Chicago 2015 Presenter: Carolyn Shelby of Tribune Publishing Description: Considering a major overhaul of your CMS or the technology that powers your website? Sometimes the latest and greatest can have unintended negative consequences for your rankings. Carolyn plots out the gotchas and strategies of upgrading site platforms without destroying your standing with Google.

2. Sebastian Wenzel, Webanalyticsbook
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3. #SEJSummit
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• Technical background, SEO, coder, speaker, trainer
• 20 year veteran of the industry
• Currently with Tribune Publishing and oversees
SEO on LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun,
and 5 other daily newspapers.
@cshel

5. Responsive!
Super Fast!
Modular!
BEAUTIFUL!
Won a
Design
Award!

7. • Some sitemaps stopped populating correctly
• Bots seemed to have a much harder time crawling the content (discovery)
• Text to Code ratios were not nearly as good
• Fancy way of delivering images does use <img> tags.
• Infinite scroll was accommodated, but fragile
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

10. Application
Layer
Presentation
Layer
Session Layer
Transport Layer
Network Layer
Data Link Layer
Physical Layer
Application
Data Transport

11. • Have a current list of all of your pages (full site crawl)
• Have a current list of all of your inbound links
• Awesome links, keep those pages or redirect
• Horrid links? 404 those URLs.
• Know where the traffic is going on your website
• Make sure you know what functionality MUST be maintained (talk to other
departments)
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

13. • Will the rendered output maintain SEO best practices?
• H1s in the right places
• Use widely accepted HTML/HTML5 practices
• Maintain existing microformats/schema
• Generally not change anything in a stupid way?
• Will it still be crawlable? As crawlable?
• Will the things that need to be done eventually get done now?
• Responsive? Mobile-friendly? Https?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

15. • Are the URLs going to change?
• How much? In what way? Will it be logical and easy to handle?
• How can we manage redirects?
• Are the paths to the images changing?
• Image search
• Are existing optimizations pulling through? Need to be redone?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

17. • Are all of the tracking/analytics scripts going to still work? Need to be
replaced?
• Are we testing page load times? Server speed? Site speed in general?
• Are we load testing?
• What’s happening to the old database? What’s happening to the old database
data?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

19. • If we’re changing hosting providers, is our email going to catastrophically break?
• If we change our master zone file for DNS, are there any subdomains that we need
to not accidentally destroy?
• What kinds of things are needed for the site to be successful, but are being
overlooked?
• Sitemaps? Landing Pages? API people still use?
• Is anyone remembering the robots.txt?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

21. • Is the UI changing so much that content producers will not be able to perform their
jobs without training?
• Is the UI changing in any minor, but incredibly important way, that people might
overlook something REALLY important?
• What other training things need to happen?
• Are we taking advantage of opportunities to eliminate or minimize human error?
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

23. • Failure to address widespread URL changes
• Failure to address user behaviors and needs in favor of flashy new “cutting edge”
design
• Loss of existing optimizations, need to redo them
• Failure to speed and load test
• Failure to remove the noindex from the new site
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

26. • Engines don’t care about your fancy back-end, they care about the rendered output.
• Do not sacrifice page speed and load times on the altar of Pretty and Shiny.
• *SO* cutting edge that the users can’t figure out how to use it defeats the purpose. Don’t
alienate the users.
Remember
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel

27. Twitter @cshel
Linkedin linkedin.com/in/cshel
Google+ +CarolynShelby
#SEJSummit
#Searchmetrics
@cshel