Burroughs Digital provides website migration SEO services — the discipline that protects your search rankings through redesigns, replatforms, domain changes, and structural overhauls. A migration done right is invisible to Google: the new site inherits everything the old one earned. Done wrong, it’s the most common self-inflicted catastrophe in search — years of accumulated rankings gone the week the new site launches, because nobody mapped the URLs.
If you’re planning any significant website change, this page is the cheapest insurance you’ll ever read. Migration SEO is part of our SEO services practice and built into every website redesign Burroughs Digital ships — but we also protect migrations other teams are building. Contact us before launch; before is when this works best.
Why Migrations Destroy Rankings
Google’s assessment of your site is attached to specific URLs: every ranking, every earned link, every accumulated signal points at an address. When a migration changes those addresses — new structure, new platform, new domain — without telling Google where everything went, the signals point at nothing. Rankings don’t transfer to the new pages; they evaporate, and rebuilding them from scratch takes as long the second time as it did the first.
The mechanism of protection is unglamorous and absolute: a complete URL map and 301 redirects, every old address permanently pointing to its new equivalent, so every signal follows. Around that core sits everything else that changes in a migration and can silently break — which is what the full service covers.
What Our Migration SEO Includes
Pre-migration baseline. A full inventory of what you’re protecting: every indexed URL, its rankings, its traffic, its backlinks. This is the manifest we check the new site against — you can’t confirm nothing was lost if you never counted what you had.
Complete URL mapping. Every old URL mapped to its new destination — one-to-one where structure allows, deliberate consolidation where it doesn’t, and explicit decisions (not accidents) about what gets retired. On large sites this is the bulk of the work; on every site it’s the part skipped by teams that later call our penalty recovery line thinking they were penalized.
Redirect implementation and testing. 301s implemented at the right layer for your stack, chains and loops eliminated, and the map tested before launch — not discovered in production.
On-page and technical parity. Titles, meta data, headings, internal links, and structured data carried to the new site deliberately; technical SEO verification that the new build is crawlable, indexable, fast, and rendering correctly — because redesigns love to ship with noindex tags left on from staging.
Launch-window monitoring. Crawl behavior, index coverage, redirect performance, and rankings watched daily through the critical weeks, with issues caught while they’re hours old instead of quarters old. Search Console change-of-address handling included for domain moves.
Post-migration verification. The manifest reconciled: what transferred, what wobbled, what needs attention — reported against the baseline per our process, so “the migration went fine” is a measured claim, not a hope.
When You Need This
Redesigns and rebuilds (even “just visual” ones — page builders and themes change URLs and markup more than anyone expects), platform moves (to or from WordPress, Shopify, or anything else), domain changes and rebrands, HTTPS or structural consolidations, and site merges after acquisitions. The common thread: URLs or rendering change at scale. If that’s happening to a site whose search traffic pays bills, migration SEO isn’t optional overhead — it’s the project’s insurance policy, priced accordingly as a scoped project on our pricing page.
Migration SEO — Frequently Asked Questions
A brief settling period of minor fluctuation is normal as Google recrawls; a well-executed migration recovers to baseline within weeks and often improves on it, since migrations are a chance to fix old structural problems. Sustained losses mean something was missed — which is what the monitoring exists to catch early.
Ask one question: “is there a complete URL map, old to new, and can I see it?” If yes, wonderful. If the answer is a version of “the important pages redirect,” that’s how long-tail rankings — often most of a site’s traffic — quietly die. Verification is cheap; discovery-in-production isn’t.
Usually, and speed matters: old URLs’ signals fade the longer they point at nothing. We reconstruct the old URL set from crawl archives and analytics, build the redirect map retroactively, and monitor the recovery.
Some settling is normal, but a properly executed domain migration — full mapping, 301s, Search Console change of address, updated citations — transfers the substantial majority of equity. It’s the most delicate migration type, and the one where doing it once, correctly, matters most.