Moving a website to a new domain, URL structure, or platform while preserving SEO equity through proper redirect mapping.
Site migration is the process of making substantial changes to a website that affect its location, structure, design, or technology stack. This includes moving to a new domain, changing URL structures, switching platforms, or implementing major redesigns. The primary challenge lies in preserving SEO equity — the accumulated search engine trust and ranking power — throughout the transition.
Migrations represent one of the highest-risk SEO activities because they can result in immediate and severe traffic losses if executed poorly. Search engines must rediscover and reassess your content, making proper planning and execution critical for maintaining organic visibility.
Why It Matters for AI SEO
AI-powered search engines like Google's RankBrain and BERT have made search more sophisticated in understanding content relationships and user intent. During migrations, these systems need clear signals about content continuity and relevance. AI algorithms analyze patterns in user behavior, content structure, and semantic relationships — all of which can be disrupted during poorly planned migrations. Modern AI SEO tools have transformed migration planning by automatically analyzing millions of URLs, identifying content relationships, and predicting potential ranking impacts. Tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can now process complex site architectures and suggest optimal redirect strategies that preserve topical authority and content clusters that AI systems value.
How It Works
Successful migrations follow a systematic approach starting with comprehensive pre-migration audits using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify high-value pages and their current rankings. Create detailed redirect maps ensuring every important URL has a corresponding destination, implementing 301 redirects for permanent moves to transfer maximum link equity. Monitor the migration closely through Google Search Console, tracking crawl errors, index coverage, and search performance metrics. Set up alerts for sudden ranking drops or traffic losses. Post-migration, conduct regular crawls to identify orphaned pages or redirect chains that could waste crawl budget and confuse search engines. Update internal links, sitemaps, and structured data to reflect new URLs. Verify that canonical tags point to correct destinations and that hreflang tags are updated for international sites. Test critical pages across devices and browsers to ensure proper rendering.
Common Mistakes
The most critical error is implementing temporary 302 redirects instead of permanent 301s, which prevents link equity transfer and signals to search engines that the change is temporary. Another frequent mistake is creating redirect chains — multiple redirects between the old and new URL — which dilute ranking signals and slow page loading. Many migrations fail due to inadequate testing of redirect implementation, resulting in redirect loops or broken links that create poor user experiences and crawl errors. Forgetting to update internal link structures means you're not taking full advantage of the migration, leaving internal links pointing to redirected URLs instead of directly to new destinations.