Content migration with a redirect plan
A planned content migration moves every page across and protects rankings with redirects and monitoring.
Background
Pages built up over years rank, attract links and bring in enquiries. If URLs change without a redirect during a website redesign or CMS change, that value is lost.
Inventory and assessment
A crawl captures every URL, supplemented by data from Google Search Console, web analytics and the XML sitemap. For each page, we decide whether to:
keep it, if it brings visitors, rankings or links
revise or merge it, if the content is duplicated or out of date
remove it, with a redirect to the most relevant new page
The crawl also reveals error pages and redirect chains that already cost visibility.
Redirects and structure
Every old URL gets a permanent 301 redirect to the matching new page. Search engines treat blanket redirects to the home page like error pages. We update internal links directly. Canonical tags, hreflang tags and the XML sitemap follow the new structure. Titles, descriptions, alt text and structured data move with the content.
Approach
We migrate large volumes automatically and spot-check by hand. Before launch, we test every redirect in the staging environment. Afterwards, we monitor crawl errors and indexing in Google Search Console.
Outcome
Small fluctuations in the first weeks are normal. After a clean migration, rankings usually settle quickly.