To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall

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Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer. 2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency. Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.


Examples of Moz XML sitemaps. 3. Spam + cruft cleanup As I mentioned earlier, israel gambling data the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years. Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower. Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.


In total, we removed over 10,000 posts. We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them. FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick. 4. Better internal linking & user experience Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience.


UX: Added breadcrumbs throughout the app Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar Breadcrumbs and related questions in the Moz Q&A forum. The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics. Results: Before and after the migration To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this.