Site Migration
In one sentence
Moving a site to a new domain, server, platform or URL structure.
Analogy Mental model
Moving house. Everybody needs the new address, and the post has to keep arriving.
In practice What you actually do
Map every old URL to exactly one new one, keep the mapping one-to-one rather than aiming everything at the home page, update internal links and the sitemap, then submit the change of address and watch crawl stats daily for a fortnight.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Traffic dips and recovers over three to six months if the redirects are right. Sending ten thousand old URLs to the home page preserves nothing, because the engine reads that as a soft 404.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →