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Advanced SEO: A 2-Minute Guide to Maintaining Your Site

By Arthur on October 18, 2025

Once you've mastered the basics, "maintaining" your site's SEO involves more technical concepts like crawl management, site migrations, and structured data. We’ve organized the key principles from official guidance into a scannable checklist.

To see how we managed a complex site migration using these rules, view our case study.

On This Page:

    1. Control How Search Engines Crawl & Index
    1. Managing International & Multi-lingual Sites
    1. How to Handle Site & Page Migrations
    1. Key Crawling & Indexing Best Practices
    1. Help Search Engines Understand Your Site (Structured Data)
    1. Manage Your User Experience (UX)
    1. Control Your Search Appearance

1. Control How Search Engines Crawl & Index

You need to tell search engines which pages to crawl, which to prioritize, and how to handle duplicate content.

  • Canonical Pages: Understand and use the rel="canonical" tag to tell search engines which version of a duplicate page is the "main" one you want indexed.
  • Robots.txt: Use this file to prevent crawling, not indexing. It's good for blocking unimportant resources (like icons) or duplicate content pages to save your crawl budget.
  • Noindex Tag: Use the noindex tag (not robots.txt) to prevent a page from being indexed (shown in search results).
  • Sitemaps: Use sitemaps to encourage crawling. This is the most important way to tell search engines which pages are important, especially for new sites, large sites, or content that changes rapidly (like images or videos).

2. Managing International & Multi-lingual Sites

If your site targets multiple languages or regions:

  • Use hreflang: This tag tells search engines about the different language variations of a specific page, ensuring the correct version is shown to the right user.
  • Be Wary of Adaptive Content: If your site changes content based on the user's location, be aware of how this might affect crawls (which are typically from one location, like the US).

3. How to Handle Site & Page Migrations

When you move content, you must do it carefully to preserve your rankings.

  • Moving One Page (Permanent): Use a 301 Redirect to signal the page has moved permanently.
  • Moving One Page (Temporary): Use a 302 Redirect to signal the move is temporary and crawlers should continue to index the original page.
  • Deleting a Page: Return a true 404 Error. You can create a custom 404 page to help users, but don't use a "soft 404" (a page that says "not found" but returns a 200 OK status).
  • Moving an Entire Site: This is a major process. You must implement 301 redirects for all pages, update your sitemaps, and then use tools like Google Search Console to inform search engines about the move.

4. Key Crawling & Indexing Best Practices

  • Make Links Crawlable: Use standard <a href="..."> tags that search engines can follow.
  • Use rel="nofollow": Apply this tag to paid links, user-submitted content (like comments), or any link you don't want to pass your site's "quality signals" to.
  • Manage Crawl Budget: For very large sites (millions of pages), use sitemaps to prioritize important pages and robots.txt to hide unimportant ones.
  • JavaScript: Follow official recommendations for JavaScript to ensure your content is rendered and indexed correctly.
  • Infinite Scroll: Search engines can have trouble with infinite scroll. Provide a paginated (page=1, page=2) version for crawlers.

5. Help Search Engines Understand Your Site (Structured Data)

  • Put Key Info in Text: Don't put important information (like names, prices, or dates) only inside images. Text is the safest way for search engines to understand your page.
  • Use Structured Data (Schema): This is code you add to your page to explicitly tell search engines what your content is about. This can help you get Rich Results (like review stars, event info, or recipe cards) in search. Tools like Google's Markup Helper can help you get started.

6. Manage Your User Experience (UX)

A good user experience is a ranking factor.

  • Use HTTPS: Secure your site. Search engines prioritize HTTPS, and browsers mark HTTP sites as "not secure."
  • Page Speed (Core Web Vitals): A fast page beats a slow page. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report to measure and improve performance.
  • Mobile-Friendly: Your site must work well on a mobile device. Most search engines now use a mobile-first crawler by default.

7. Control Your Search Appearance

  • Rich Results: Use Structured Data (see section 5) to become eligible for special search features like review stars, FAQs, and more.
  • Favicon: Provide a favicon to be shown in search results.
  • Title Links & Snippets: Follow best practices on how to write good title tags and meta descriptions to improve how your page looks in search results.

Read the Full Sources

This post is a summary of official technical guidance. To see how we used these principles to perform a full technical SEO audit, read our case study.

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