Migration Mayhem

How to play

• Desktop: arrow keys or WASD to change lanes, Up, W or Space to jump, Down or S to slide, P or Esc to pause.
• Mobile: swipe left, right, up or down, or use the on-screen pad.
• Collect 301s, sitemaps, internal links and canonicals. Five in a row raises your streak multiplier.
• Every 20 to 30 seconds a migration decision appears. Run into the lane with the right answer.
• You have three segments of organic visibility. Redirect maps and monitoring give a one-hit shield.

Why website migration SEO matters

A website migration can give your business a fresh start, but get the SEO wrong and years of hard-earned search visibility can disappear with the old site. Whether you're redesigning, changing CMS or moving domains, Google needs to understand what's changed, where your content has moved and which pages should remain visible in search. Broken redirects, missing pages, indexing mistakes and overlooked technical details can turn an exciting website launch into an organic traffic nightmare.

What you'll learn

301 redirects

A permanent redirect sends users and Google from an old URL to its closest matching new URL.

404 and 410

The right answer for a URL that is gone for good with no relevant replacement. Losing an important page without a redirect is the problem, not 404s in general.

Noindex

A tag that keeps a page out of Google. Useful on staging, disastrous if it survives on live pages.

robots.txt

A file that controls crawling. A leftover Disallow: / can hide your whole new site.

Canonical tags

Tell Google which URL is the preferred version. After a migration they should point at the new URLs.

XML sitemap

A list of the new, indexable URLs you want Google to find.

Search Console

Google's free tool for monitoring indexing, crawl errors and performance after launch.

Change of Address

A Search Console tool for domain or subdomain moves only, not CMS changes on the same domain.