Playbook3 sections · 2 min readBy Dezső Mező · Published October 3, 2026.mdMigrationSEORedirects
A site's URLs are an accumulated asset: every backlink, bookmark and ranking lives at an address. A redesign that changes the addresses without forwarding the old ones is demolishing the building the equity lives in. This is the migration checklist — the same one we run — that moves the site without handing the rankings back.
01Crawl before you touch anything
The migration map starts with a full crawl of the live site — every URL, every title, every redirect chain — plus the pages Search Console and the backlink profile know about that the crawl misses. The 404s you find after launch were all visible before it.
02One-to-one, not one-to-home
Every retired URL 301s to its closest living equivalent — same intent, closest content. Blanket-redirecting everything to the homepage is a soft 404 in a trench coat: Google treats it as 'page gone', and the user who followed a specific link gets a lobby, not an answer.
03Watch the fortnight after
Launch day is when the checking starts: Search Console coverage weekly, 404 logs daily for two weeks, the redirect map tested with the actual crawler, and the old sitemap compared to what Google now shows. Rankings wobble for days; they collapse for weeks — the difference is caught here.
What to take away
- Crawl first — the map is made of what exists, not what you remember.
- 301 one-to-one; homepage redirects are soft 404s.
- Flatten chains; keep the old XML sitemap as a checklist.
- Watch coverage and 404s for two weeks after launch.
More from the lab
Browse all entries
The AI-search visibility checklist we run on this site
Structured data an answer engine can use
One site, three languages, zero duplicate-content problems
The EU accessibility deadline passed — what still applies
Want this looked at on your own system?Start a conversation
