Incremental migration to NextJS - Effect on SEO
Answered
Thai posted this in #help-forum
ThaiOP
We are planning to migrate our site currently on Jekyll over to NextJS. I am testing out the fallback rewrite and all looks to work as expected. If a NextJS page doesn't exist for a route, it falls back to the Jekyll page.
Our one concern is how this will impact SEO. Is there anything we should keep in mind when rolling this out? Or if anyone has experience with an incremental migration and would be willing to discuss I would be happy to reach out!
Thank you!
Our one concern is how this will impact SEO. Is there anything we should keep in mind when rolling this out? Or if anyone has experience with an incremental migration and would be willing to discuss I would be happy to reach out!
Thank you!
Answered by kylemh
👋🽠I don't see how it can negatively affect SEO 🤔
You mentioned that 404s fallback to your Jekyll app. As long as the same thing is happening in THAT app and as long as the Jekyll app back-links to your Next.js app for any routes IT serves...
I think if that's the case and both apps host the same robots.txt + sitemap.xml, you're good to go!
You mentioned that 404s fallback to your Jekyll app. As long as the same thing is happening in THAT app and as long as the Jekyll app back-links to your Next.js app for any routes IT serves...
I think if that's the case and both apps host the same robots.txt + sitemap.xml, you're good to go!
7 Replies
ThaiOP
Also tagging @kylemh as I originally found this Discord server from his post on Reddit
👋🽠I don't see how it can negatively affect SEO 🤔
You mentioned that 404s fallback to your Jekyll app. As long as the same thing is happening in THAT app and as long as the Jekyll app back-links to your Next.js app for any routes IT serves...
I think if that's the case and both apps host the same robots.txt + sitemap.xml, you're good to go!
You mentioned that 404s fallback to your Jekyll app. As long as the same thing is happening in THAT app and as long as the Jekyll app back-links to your Next.js app for any routes IT serves...
I think if that's the case and both apps host the same robots.txt + sitemap.xml, you're good to go!
Answer
ThaiOP
Thanks @kylemh! The functionality seems to work great so i'm definitely feeling good about moving forward with it. Good note on making sure the robots and sitemap match for both repos.
One unknown is around the old site which would be used as the proxy. Our old Jekyll site is hosted on Netlify, so we have the default Netlify URL we can use as the proxy without having to spin up a new subdomain (such as old.<site>.com).
The only downside is this default Netlify URL would still be accessible if you go to it directly. I'm not too concerned with this, as that default Netlify URL is also available currently for our live site. Our canonical URL is set correctly so i'm assuming that's the reason we haven't had any issues with the Netlify URL from accidentally being indexed.
Wondering if you have any insight/recommendations as to how the old site proxy URL should be setup, is there a way we can prevent this URL from being accessed? Should we noindex it? Or is having the correct canonnical enough?
One unknown is around the old site which would be used as the proxy. Our old Jekyll site is hosted on Netlify, so we have the default Netlify URL we can use as the proxy without having to spin up a new subdomain (such as old.<site>.com).
The only downside is this default Netlify URL would still be accessible if you go to it directly. I'm not too concerned with this, as that default Netlify URL is also available currently for our live site. Our canonical URL is set correctly so i'm assuming that's the reason we haven't had any issues with the Netlify URL from accidentally being indexed.
Wondering if you have any insight/recommendations as to how the old site proxy URL should be setup, is there a way we can prevent this URL from being accessed? Should we noindex it? Or is having the correct canonnical enough?
You could conditionally insert a nofollow meta tag into the head of the Jekyll site for the pages you dont want double-counted. The condition would be that the hostname includes "netlify".
ThaiOP
I like that idea. I appreciate the quick response and definitely feel better about presenting this to the team to get the ball rolling. Thanks again for your help!
which reddit post btw?
ThaiOP