redirect-migration-planlisted

# Redirects and Site Migrations Migrations are the highest-risk routine work in SEO. A site that has taken four years to build can lose most of its organic traffic in a week, and the cause is almost always the same: URLs changed and the redirects were incomplete, chained, or pointed somewhere generic. The good news is that a migration done properly loses very little. The work is unglamorous and entirely front-loaded. ## Before anything: is this migration necessary? Ask it once, plainly. A lot of URL restructures are driven by an aesthetic preference for tidier paths, and the SEO value of tidier paths is close to zero. Migrate when: the domain is genuinely changing, the platform can't do the job, two sites are merging, or the current structure actively blocks growth. Don't migrate to move `/blog/2019/03/post-title` to `/blog/post-title` unless something else is already forcing a rebuild. If it goes ahead, change one thing at a time. Domain, structure, platform and design all at once means that when traffic drops you have no idea which change caused it. ## Step 1: Inventory everything, before you touch anything You cannot redirect URLs you don't know about. Gather from all four sources, because each misses things the others catch: ```bash # 1. The sitemap — what the site thinks it has curl -s https://old.example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' > urls-sitemap.txt # 2. A full crawl — what's actually linked # (any crawler; the point is coverage, not the t