Cambridge University Technical SEO Case Study
Migrating a 2 million Page Website for one of the most Prestigious universities in the world
The Approach
Brief
The client approached us to help with a migration of one of their faculty websites with over 500,000 pages of academic papers and resources.
The client required consultancy on how best to migrate to a new CMS, how to arrange the new information architecture and how to stage the migration without losing any traffic or breaking any links.
Strategy
Due to the size of the site and the niche content on each page, we knew we would need to develop a programmatic way of crawling the site to determine URL patterns and internal linking structures.
The programmatic crawling needed to be fast so we could implement changes and test them at scale to carry out QA and bug checking throughout the migration process.
Results
Our technical lead used a regex crawling pattern to uncover all the website templates used across the site. Furthermore, we used the archive.org API to pull every URL on the site that has ever existed so we could crawl it, establish redirect chains and then unpick all previous redirects.
As this site was over 15 years old, this was a core part of the migration. In the end we created a map of 2.5m URLs that needed to be unpicked and redirected to a final destination.
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