How to check redirects after a migration

When you migrate a site, move to a new domain or to HTTPS, or change your URL structure, every old address should lead to the right new one with a single 301 redirect. Every chain and every redirect to the home page costs you rankings the old page had.

Before the migration: save the old addresses

1. Crawl the old site and save the crawl. That is your list of every old address.
2. Add the addresses the crawler can't see: export pages from Search Console and Analytics (see integrations), so you don't lose pages without internal links.

Redirect map

Once the new site is on staging, crawl that as well. SEO Bee can suggest a map: for every old page that has no match at the same path, it finds the most similar new indexable page by path, title, H1, description and text. If the new site is on a staging address, enter the real domain and the map gets the final addresses.

Every suggestion has a score and shows how it was found: Same path, Meaning, Text or Similar path. The score helps you review, it isn't a guarantee: a person checks every row before it goes on the server.

After the migration: check every old address

1. Choose URL list and load the old addresses from the saved crawl.
2. Start the crawl. The crawler follows redirects to the end and records every hop.
3. Open the Redirect chains report. Fix anything with more than one hop so the old address goes straight to the final one.
4. Open Redirects ending in an error. These are old addresses that end up returning a 404 or 5xx: the most urgent items in the whole migration.
5. Check the redirect type in the Response codes tab: replace 302, JavaScript and meta refresh redirects with 301s wherever the change is permanent.

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