Website Migrations and Hreflang Integration

Many global e-commerce sites seem to be on the annual rotation of eCommerce Platforms. Few make SEO a priority, and even fewer ensure hreflang is implemented correctly. 

Last week a former consulting client reached out to me aking me if I can see why two of his market websites they just migrated from SFCC to Shopify were not indexed in Google.  His analytics showed a complete drop in traffic and no pages in GSC.  I initially thought the developers failed to remove a robots.txt block or robot exclusion in the pages.  Then I noticed the hreflang block in the pages only listed that single market.  The same goes for the other underperforming website. I immediately knew the problem. Because the two platforms were unaware of each other, they could not include those pages in their respective hreflang clusters.  Without the hreflang in place, these new pages looked like duplicates of the other same-language markets, and Google’s duplicate content algorithm flagged them as duplicates and did not index them.

We are seeing this more and more with eCommerce migrations where failure to incorporate hreflang properly may result in a significant content cannibalization crisis, resulting in the websites not being indexed. We have written about this previously, describing e-commerce brands that have multiple platforms, many of which get swapped out each year.  

A correct hreflang implementation is crucial during a site migration for several reasons:

Preserving Indexing and Crawling Efficiency: Proper hreflang tags help search engines efficiently index and crawl the right pages. During a site migration, this can be especially important to ensure that search engines correctly understand and index new URLs without unnecessary delays. Gary from Google indicated that a crawling dependency is “triggered” when they encounter hreflang to verify the alternates, resulting in faster indexing of the new language pages.

 Like, if you publish something … and sell it on multiple markets, then you probably want that annotation to be seen as fast as possible by Googlebot because there is a dependency crawl triggering when we discover Hreflang, like we want to verify that.

Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues: Without proper hreflang elements, search engines might consider different language versions of a page as duplicate content, which can harm the site’s SEO. Correct hreflang implementation ensures search engines recognize these pages as distinct language versions targeted at different audiences.

Maintaining SEO Value: Similar to the critical need for redirects during a migration, hreflang elements help search engines understand which language and regional versions of a page should be shown to users based on their language preferences and location. During a site migration, ensuring hreflang tags are correctly implemented can prevent loss of SEO value and maintain the site’s search engine rankings across different regions.

Enhancing User Experience: By correctly implementing hreflang tags, you can direct users to the most appropriate version of your site based on their language and location, improving their overall experience. During a migration, this helps retain and engage your international audience.

Reducing Traffic Drops: A site migration can lead to temporary traffic drops. Correct hreflang tags help mitigate this risk by ensuring that users are directed to the right pages, thereby maintaining traffic levels across different site language versions.

In summary, a correct hreflang implementation during a site migration helps preserve SEO value, avoid duplicate content issues, enhance user experience, maintain efficient indexing and crawling, and reduce traffic drops.

Hreflang Builder was developed around the need to integrate migrations. Our unique mapping matrix model is perfect for managing cross-CMS migrations at a fundamental level. If you have hreflang in place before the migration, you have identified the alternates for each market. Since you have those relationships and a good SEO team will generate a from-to-redirect model (old page to new page) that same model can be imported into Hreflang Builder along with your current hreflang implementation. Because all of the old pages are mapped, and the new page is mapped to the old pages, then the new pages are not mapped to all of the other market pages. This makes it possible to deploy hreflang at the time of launch, significantly increasing the indexing rate. Our tests have found those that used a correct hreflang n launch had pages indexed more than 80% faster than those who did not use hreflang at launch.

If you have not done so, you may want to ensure that hreflang elements are part of your site migration acceptance testing to ensure your hreflang is correct when migrating.