00Guides
Migrations lose rankings when they are treated as an engineering task. Treated as a search task first, the rankings carry over. Here is the discipline that does it.
Rankings are held by inventorying every URL that has search equity, mapping redirects one-to-one to the closest equivalent, checking content and metadata parity rather than mere presence, and staging the cutover so it is observable and reversible. Performance and rankings are baselined before the switch so any regression is visible.
The URLs that rank, earn traffic or carry inbound links are the asset you must not break. Build the list from a crawl, analytics, Search Console and a backlink source, then deduplicate it.
Anything not on that list can change freely. Anything on it needs a deliberate destination.
Every old URL with equity gets a 301 to its closest equivalent on the new site. A blanket redirect to the homepage throws the equity away, and redirect chains or loops dilute and delay it.
Run the finished map through a checker before launch so chains, loops and unmapped URLs are caught while they are still cheap to fix. The free redirect-map auditor does exactly this in the browser.
A page that still exists but has lost its content, title, headings, structured data or internal links has still lost its rankings. Parity means the new page carries or improves what made the old one rank.
Check content, metadata, structured data and the internal link graph page by page for the equity list, not as a spot sample.
Move a lower-risk segment first, watch indexation and rankings, and keep a rollback path. A single big-bang flip with no way back turns a recoverable mistake into a permanent one.
Baseline rankings, traffic and Core Web Vitals before the cutover. Without a baseline you cannot tell an uplift from a regression, and you cannot prove the migration was safe.
The mistakes that cost rankings at the cutover.
The tool and the service that go with this guide.
Run your map through it before launch. Catches chains, loops and unmapped URLs. No sign-up.
The scoped engagement this guide describes.
The migration question, answered in full.
Tell us what you are moving off. We will tell you whether a migration is worth it before we take the work.