Rankings belong to URLs. When a site is rebuilt and the URLs change, every ranking attached to the old addresses is at risk unless search engines are told, clearly and correctly, where each page has gone. Most rebuild projects are run by designers and developers who are excellent at building sites and have never been asked to think about this.
The result is familiar: a new site launches, looks better than the old one, and loses a third of its search traffic over the following month. By the time anyone notices, the old URLs have been dropped from the index and recovery takes months.
Where migrations go wrong
| What happens | How it is prevented | |
|---|---|---|
| Everything redirected to the homepage | Search engines treat it as a soft 404; rankings go | One-to-one redirect map, old URL to nearest equivalent |
| Redirect chains | Old to interim to new — authority leaks at each hop | Every redirect points straight at the final URL |
| Staging robots rule left live | Whole site blocked from indexing at launch | Launch checklist includes robots.txt and noindex |
| Content trimmed in the redesign | Pages lose the text they ranked for | Old content audited before anything is cut |
| Images and PDFs forgotten | Image search traffic and linked documents lost | Media URLs included in the redirect map |
The work happens before launch
Migration support is mostly done before the new site exists. We crawl the old site completely, record every URL that has traffic, links or rankings, and map each one to its destination on the new site. That map becomes the redirect rules, and it is the single most valuable document in the whole project.
We also check the new site on staging for the mistakes that only show up at scale: missing titles, canonicals pointing at the staging domain, and pages that exist on the old site with no equivalent on the new one.
Launch day and the month after
On launch we verify the redirects live, submit the new sitemap, and use Search Console to watch how quickly the new URLs are picked up. For the following month we compare rankings and traffic against the old baseline weekly, so a problem is caught while it is still cheap to fix rather than discovered at the next quarterly review.
If the migration has already happened
Recovery is possible, though slower than prevention. We rebuild the old URL list from Search Console, backlink data and archived copies of the site, then add the missing redirects. Rankings usually return if the fix comes within a few months; the longer the old URLs have been returning errors, the more is permanently lost.