SEO error and traffic drop recovery
Traffic dropped after an update, a migration or a redesign. I diagnose exactly what happened and fix it.
Custom quote
Technical projects
Website migrations
A badly planned migration destroys years of rankings in weeks. I take care of the whole process with technical control before, during and after the change.
- Before and after
- Prior inventory and later monitoring
- Rollback plan
- What to do if something goes wrong
- Any stack
- CMS, framework or custom build
What it covers
Every change a search engine reads as a different website
A migration is not just changing domain. Any of these moves changes how a search engine sees you, and all of them go wrong when done without a prior inventory.
- Domain or protocol change
- CMS or technology change
- Redesign with template and structure changes
- URL and taxonomy restructures
- Merging several domains into one, or splitting one into several
- Internationalisation: moving to a multilingual or multi-country structure
How it is controlled
The prior inventory is what saves the migration
What sinks a migration is almost never the visible part: it is the URL nobody knew was bringing traffic, the canonical left pointing at the old domain, the redirect chain that returns a 302 to a 404.
Before anything is touched, a complete inventory of what exists is taken: URLs, traffic, inbound links, positions. That document is what lets you know, the following week, whether a drop is a problem or just noise.
- A URL-to-URL redirect map, with no chains and no loops
- Validation of canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps and robots.txt at the destination
- Indexing and traffic comparison before and after, by template and by directory
- Review of internal linking and of inbound links pointing at retired URLs
- Rollback plan: what gets undone and in what order if we have to go back
How it works
The four stages
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Inventory and plan
The full current state is recorded and the destination map is decided: which URL goes to which, and what is retired on purpose.
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Preparing the destination
Redirects, canonicals, sitemaps and robots.txt ready and tested in staging before the day of the change.
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The day of the change
Deployment with live checks: status codes, rendering, crawling and server errors.
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Monitoring afterwards
The following weeks are the ones that decide. Tracking indexing, crawling and traffic, and fixing whatever shows up.
FAQ
What people ask before hiring
Can a site be migrated without losing traffic?
Without a temporary dip, it is hard: Google needs time to process the change. What can be achieved is that the dip is small and recovers within weeks, instead of becoming permanent.
Do you work with my development team or do it all?
Either way. If you have a team, I handle the plan and the technical control and they deploy; if you do not, I do the implementation as well.
What if the migration already happened and went badly?
Then it is a rescue, and the sooner the better. We reconstruct the inventory that should have existed and fix what can be fixed. It is closer to SEO error recovery.
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Next step
Shall we talk about
your project?
Tell me what is going on and I will be straight with you about whether this service is what you need or whether something else fits better.