Overview
An established online store with several thousand products migrated to a new platform. The redesign looked great, the new checkout converted better — and within six weeks, organic traffic had fallen by nearly half. Rankings that had taken years to build were disappearing category by category, and nobody on the team could point to a single cause.
That’s the signature of migration damage: not one dramatic error, but dozens of quiet ones compounding.
Problem
The technical audit surfaced four issues working against each other:
Thousands of old URLs returned 404s or passed through 3–4 redirect hops. Years of accumulated link equity was evaporating on every hop.
- Broken redirect map
- Duplicate category pages
- Index bloat
organic traffic within six weeks of migration
Each issue alone was survivable. Together they were compounding: Google wasted its crawl budget on junk, split authority across duplicates, and quietly demoted the categories that made the money.
Approach
We ran the recovery as engineering, not guesswork — a full diagnosis first, then fixes in strict order of revenue impact.
The solution included:
- Redirect surgery — one-hop 301s rebuilt page-to-page for ~2,000 priority URLs
- Index cleanup — canonicals and robots rules to remove 38,000 junk URLs
- Internal linking restoration — money categories rescued from orphan status
The sequence mattered as much as the fixes: redirects first to stop the equity bleed, cleanup second so Google could see the real site, linking third so authority flowed back to the pages that earn.
Outcome
Traffic recovered past pre-migration levels within five months, finishing 64% above the pre-crisis baseline.
Rankings returned across every priority category — most settling higher than before the migration, because the cleanup also fixed problems that had quietly capped growth for years.
The results were immediate and measurable:
organic traffic vs. baseline
+
more crawl activity on money pages
With the technical debt cleared, every future investment — content, links, new categories — now lands on a foundation that passes value instead of leaking it.
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