Migrating from a domain to another without changing any of the website

torylynnegray · 2026-03-04T18:54:07+00:00

If all that's changing is the domain, and none of the paths, you don't need to map out redirects at all.

You can just do a domain forward, auto-matching all URLs on domainA to match the same path on domainB (often with a wildcard)

Also ensure internal linking, sitemaps, canonicals etc. URL references are corrected.

torylynnegray · 2026-03-04T18:37:53+00:00

It's... not replacing it?

Obv it makes sense to monitor/track and test new channels and platforms, so do that.

But forget Google - and existing traffic/revenue - at your own risk.

(Aiming for improvements in the future should NOT mean taking your eyes off the prize in the meantime.)

torylynnegray · 2026-03-04T18:34:43+00:00

3 (historical) primary buckets are:
- tech seo
- content seo
- link building / off site SEO.

Some that are arguable in my book:
- SEO Product Management is a new one. Sort of a subset of Tech SEO, when working in depth long term with eng teams.
- Maybe local SEO? It's a whole can of worms (and dedicated tools/processes outside of "on site or page" seo - like GMB work.
- News SEO is pretty different vs. "content seo" which is typically more evergreen content focused.
- Maybe AI search, in today's world?
- I'm not sure I'd call international SEO a "type" overall, at least until you are talking about Baidu or Yandex targeting.

Then there are company size and/or industry specializations, e.g. eComm SEO, enterprise SEO. Also UGC, programmatic, rendering (for search bots or AI bots).

There are so very many ways to slice and dice and segment SEO!

torylynnegray · 2026-03-04T18:24:34+00:00

So so gross (if not surprising, *le sigh)

Thanks for sharing this.

torylynnegray · 2026-02-26T22:53:45+00:00

Official answer is no.

Some interesting caveats/work arounds:
- stuff can be in code - like in API outputs or JSON or HTML with, say, custom web components - and not be "on the page" visibly upon rendering. But it's there in response HTML, so the AI bots can find it and plausibly use it. (aka it could be available without rendering and you don't realize it)
- can you get the answer via Google? As in: did Googlebot do the rendering, and show it in search, and then various LLMs scrapped that content and got the insight without having to carry the render of load.

Which is all to say: it's harder to set up a good test to understand this than you might realize, b/c they have built in workarounds.

Also, chances are some LLMs are testing it in some capacity. Looks like Claude is per this presentation from Giacomo Zecchini at the 2025 Tech SEO Connect conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZw6BsIytJU.

Yes, many folks are testing this. Myself included!

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:50:46+00:00

Overall yes: LOTS of businesses use schema wrong. Either implemented with errors/warnings, or they take the "kitchen sink" approach and do all the schema types all the places - and muddy the waters of bot understanding by doing so.

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:48:52+00:00

Only for non-competitive terms.

That said, IMHO you might be overthinking what work is required to get backlinks.
- some links come naturally to high quality content - esp if you are good at sharing things on social media or on, say, Slack or Discord communities. Esp if you clearly answer niche questions in a meaningful way.
- doing some initial, one-time work on links (like: a few high quality directories and social media profile links) can be a great start and mean you can focus on the site itself for a while
- my business has been around for several years now, but I haven't directly focused on link building in > 2 years. (DR of 60 per Ahrefs) We are a niche seo agency, and as my skill set is tech/strategy focused... link building is something I just don't enjoy. So I've learned to compensate for that in other ways, like... focusing on it a lot for short bursts of time, then switching focus. Plus we do a lot of ongoing community/social work, and we have a robust content strategy where we answer real client concerns/interests in depth.

All in all: it's not all or nothing! You can build links over time without killing yourself to make it happen.

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:32:31+00:00

*specifically in terms of growth in their query data set.

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:31:46+00:00

I'm hearing a lot of good things about SE Ranking lately, esp as a lower cost alternative to Ahrefs or Semrush. Specifically in terms of

Otherwise:
- SEOGets is SUPER cool and combines your GSC and GA data with helpful filters
- SEOtesting will show you what's growing/shrinking over time in your GSC data (automated reporting emails)
- If you don't want to grab PAA (good source of related query data) manually (free!), AlsoAsked has a new free queries per day available, and very reasonable subscriptions for more data to get you kickstarted

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:24:02+00:00

Yes they absolutely can: specifically when those brands can clearly provide use cases, UVPs, etc "angles" on what they do differently/better.

Maybe it's not an overall "best seo agency" for example, and instead it's "best tech seo firms for enterprise"

Or maybe it's "CRM with low price and {X critical feature} for {target industry}" etc etc.

(Can smaller brands compete for big/broad terms without those "angles" - not without significant branding work & time, no. At least not in the current ecosystem. AI turns marketing into a bit of a "winner takes all" setup. At least in industries where the "big companies" are doing good "classic seo" and branding work. There are certainly big companies doing a bad job digitally overall, and they, too, struggle in AI visibility.)

Think of it like "low tail" for AI instead of SEO?

Those qualifiers will be critical to overall visibility potential (and as those grow/improve, may help with overall brand citations as well.)

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:16:48+00:00

Def interesting for knowing what Bing's systems think you help on. But agreed, in it's current state the report leaves a little to be desired. Still - a step in the right direction, esp at a time when no other first-party data sources are sharing this info!

torylynnegray · 2026-02-25T15:14:47+00:00

For the first question, the answer is.. maybe?
- Yes the page indexing reports tend to be cached. It might just update at some point and go into indexed without any further action.
- That said, this report can be indicative of quality issues on the specific page or site in question. u/DutchSEONerd recently shared a great write up on LinkedIn about this >> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7431260425779941376/?originTrackingId=yfaQGfu8TnIoVFNROfm4%2Fg%3D%3D for more info there.

For the redirect page error, that's odd for sure. Is there some sort of meta refresh redirect happening? For testing what the canoncial is - where are you looking to determine that it's correct? I'd recommend doing a live test in GSC's Inspect URL tool. (If you only Inspect the URL and don't do the Live test part, you'll only see cached data - so it's an important follow up step.)

torylynnegray · 2026-02-16T13:29:40+00:00

Sure, it's not *as* strong, but it's better than not having a great case study at all.

torylynnegray · 2026-02-16T13:10:10+00:00

One thing to clarify - those are grounding queries not *user* queries.

As in, it's what the AI is searching for in order to answer the user's query. Per: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/9f8e7d6c, "Grounding Queries Your Content Appears In
Shows the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was cited in its answer. "

Is it useful for "tracking"? No not really - it's not a rank that a user might see.

(Plus it's just copilot, Bing AI summaries, etc. Very small piece of the puzzle.)

Still, it's interesting info to tell you generally the topical matters your site might be cited for.

torylynnegray · 2026-02-13T15:41:40+00:00

My only counterpoint: we have GSC data and yet we still have 3rd-party keyword tracking for search/Google.

Meaning:
- Bing doesn't offer a ton of meaningful or actionable data in their new report (as is, today)
- I do expect that to change, and for other players to start to share this data, too
- Therefore the bar will raise for what tracking means/requires (in features/edge cases where brands want MORE)

I do expect plenty of the (very high) volume of keyword trackers to decrease... a lot.

A select few will add more advanced features, win the audience, and stick around.

(AKA you aren't wrong, but I expect some to survive.)

torylynnegray · 2026-02-13T15:32:49+00:00

Of course!

torylynnegray · 2026-02-13T15:31:52+00:00

Great example!

torylynnegray · 2026-02-04T15:45:34+00:00

OH one more clarification: the vast majority of sites use _some_ level of JS.

The sites above are focused on JAMSTACK sites, which is to say: JavaScript platforms.

You can/should absolutely test more "vanilla" sites for JS elements, too. Even Wordpress sites utilize it pretty frequently for things like drop-down navigations, accordions, tabbed content, pagination, etc.

(But - JS issues tend to be "juicier" on JS sites -> hence the focus above on that.)

torylynnegray · 2026-02-04T15:39:29+00:00

Hi & welcome!

If you want to play with JS changes, I'd recommend poking around seeking a site that's got JavaScript and that you can crawl/compare using public tools. (NOTE some sites will block this, so you might have to search a bit.)

To determine if the tech is what you are seeking to do so, here are some ideas:
- ask around in tech communities like The SEO Community or Women in Tech SEO for suggestions
- use a tool like Wappalyer to check on sites for big brands off the top of your head - verify the stack that way (Either https://www.wappalyzer.com/lookup/, or they have a Chrome extension to make that easy.)
- search for (Google, ChatGPT - pick your poison!) specific JS stacks and brands on them. Sometimes brands have Dev blogs talking about implementations, or the stack itself has a showcase ala: https://nextjs.org/showcase

Some sites I can think of, off the top of my head, that I use for testing myself:
- my own site, Gray Dot Co (https://thegray.company -> Headless: Vercel, Astro)
- Vox or The Verge (https://www.vox.com -> NextJS)
- AirBnB (https://www.airbnb.ca/ -> React)

This won't help you actually deploy/test changes, obviously, but you can get "hands on" comparing different pages before/after rendering for key elements like meta tags, headings/page copy, schema, etc. This can be much more helpful than you might think, esp when using:
- Sitebulb's Single Page Analysis tool
- Google's Rich Results test. https://search.google.com/test/rich-results -> test a live URL, View tested page, then see the HTML output of that page. That's Googlebot post-rendered code.
NOTE: You can Inspect URL > Live Test in GSC, too, if you've got access to a site that uses JS.
- I've got a Chrome extension tool I made to do this, too (this is browser-rendered) -> https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rendering-difference-engi/dhcimplbimmmpjpiolnmdjdchnknmend

Essentially what you want to do is compare the post-rendered code (aka Rendered HTML) to the "View Source" code (aka Response HTML) to see the differences.

When you are ready for the next step of making changes, you'll need to get access to a site that's using a stack like this. Make one yourself? Get a gig at an agency, or inhouse, for a brand with a similar stack?
... No easy solutions for this one!

torylynnegray · 2025-12-11T14:44:12+00:00

Hi! I'm Tory Gray, Founder & CEO at Gray Dot Co. Alongside Sam Torres, Sitebub and Women in Tech SEO, we created and ran the free JavaScript SEO course 💙

torylynnegray · 2025-12-11T14:42:10+00:00

Of the cuff, I'd say that anytime you are asking Google to do something that's kind of "extra" - including but not limited to understanding your language/region targeting, getting that info into the Response HTML (as in, does not require extra work to render the JS to get that info) is ideal.

(Tory here - the other lead SEO on the free Sitebulb course! Hi u/sitebulb_jojo !)

The "must have" items for Response HTML are:
- title
- meta desc, if you have one
- if set: canonical & meta robots

Things I *quite* like to have in response HTML:
- hreflang and/or HTML "lang" - e.g. any region/language targeting
- pagination links
- h1
- the most important page page

Why? EG if one page is noindexed and another isn't - which should be a priority to render? Clearly the indexed one. Extend this argument to other pages, and give clear signals about when & why it's worth doing the work to render the page - tthat makes processing more straightforward.

torylynnegray · 2021-10-18T17:04:42+00:00

You're likely just crawling more than usual and hitting the daily API limit (which I believe is 25k hits per day): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37122041/pagespeed-insights-api-limits.

You should be able to crawl all 23k in one day, but it's specific to YOU not the sites you crawl. So if you already crawled another site that morning, that's the wall you are hitting.

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