Case Study: Worcester Bosch

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 canonicalisation 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’ve managed.

Once 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 would have any bearing on the continued presence on search engines.

Due to the sheer size and volume of the site, the process took six months to complete, exactly in line with the relaunch schedule.

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’re immediately passing credibility to any new URLs or pages. 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.