Question 1

How long should 301 redirects stay in place?

Accepted Answer

At minimum, one to two years after the migration. In practice, redirects for pages with external inbound links should be kept indefinitely — the cost of maintaining them is low, and removing them breaks any links pointing to the old URL. Redirects for pages with no external links and low traffic can be removed after two years if there's a technical or maintenance reason to do so. There's rarely a strong reason to remove redirects — the risk of removing them outweighs the benefit in almost all cases.

Question 2

Should I migrate the domain and the design at the same time?

Accepted Answer

Avoid combining changes where possible. A domain migration is one of the highest-risk SEO events; a platform migration with URL changes is another; a complete design overhaul is a third. Each one introduces variables that make it harder to diagnose problems if traffic drops. If you must do all three at once, ensure the checklist above is completed thoroughly before launch — and give yourself at least a month of monitoring before drawing conclusions about what caused any post-migration changes.

Question 3

How do I notify Google of a domain migration specifically?

Accepted Answer

Search Console has a specific tool for this: in the old property, go to Settings → Change of Address. This signals to Google that the site has moved to a new domain and accelerates the re-evaluation of the new domain's authority. The tool requires you to have both the old and new domains verified in Search Console. Note: this only helps with domain migrations, not URL restructures within the same domain — those rely on the redirect map and sitemap updates alone.

Question 4

When should I involve an SEO specialist in a migration?

Accepted Answer

Before the project starts, not after it's built. The SEO decisions that matter most in a migration — URL structure, redirect strategy, canonical implementation — need to be made during the build phase, not retrofitted after launch. Involving an SEO specialist at the brief stage ensures the new site architecture is built with SEO in mind from the beginning. Involving them after launch to "fix" an already-built site is significantly more costly and may require structural changes the development team has already moved past.

Question 5

What's the single most common cause of permanent (not temporary) traffic loss?

Accepted Answer

Missing redirects on pages that had real external backlinks or strong rankings — not the high-traffic pages everyone remembers to map, but the second-tier pages that get forgotten: an old comparison page, a discontinued product with a few hundred backlinks, a glossary page ranking quietly for a long-tail term. A crawl-based URL inventory cross-referenced against Search Console and your backlink tool is what catches these before launch instead of three months after.

Question 6

Do I need to update my XML sitemap before or after launch?

Accepted Answer

Build the new sitemap before launch so it's ready to submit the moment the new site goes live — but it should only contain new-site URLs, and only go live (be submitted and linked from robots.txt) at the same moment as the new site itself. Submitting a sitemap full of new URLs while the old site is still live, or vice versa, creates a confusing signal about which URLs are current.

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Site Migration SEO Checklist: Change Platforms Without Losing Traffic