Keeping external popularity signals during a website migration

Part of a site's popularity does not depend on the site itself: it comes from the links other sites give it, the listings and profiles that cite it, the mentions of its brand. During a migration, all these sources keep pointing to the old addresses, sometimes to the old domain name. If those addresses lead nowhere, the popularity earned is lost.

This article lists these external signals and what to do for each. The general method is in our SEO migration guide; internal linking, the links between your own pages, in the article on internal PageRank during a migration.

These signals fall into five families: inbound links (backlinks), mentions and citations of the brand, business listings and directory profiles, social networks and campaigns, and the structured data through which the site describes the organisation. The first weigh directly in rankings; the others help Google connect the brand, the site and its addresses, and bring traffic.

This is the most important and most fragile signal. Before the migration:

• list the pages that receive links, with the Search Console "Links" report and a tool such as Ahrefs or Majestic (see our comparison of backlink tools);
• check that each of these pages has a 301 redirect to its new equivalent page, in a single hop, and not to the home page;
• for the most valuable links (media, partners, institutions), ask for the link to be updated to the new address: the redirect stays, but a direct link is safer in the long run.

Why these links matter so much during a migration: see the importance of backlinks in an SEO migration; should every URL that receives some be redirected: the answer here.

A brand cited without a link, in the press or on a blog, is still a signal. It only becomes a problem if the brand or the domain changes: in that case, look for mentions of the old name and suggest an update to the most visible sites. Citations that combine a business's name, address and phone number (the "NAP" of local SEO) must stay consistent everywhere. Rebranding is covered in our article on migration after an acquisition or a rebrand.

Update the site address wherever you control it:

• the Google Business Profile and its equivalents (Bing Places, Apple Business Connect);
• professional and industry directories, marketplaces, supplier, distributor and partner sites;
• the company's profiles on review and recruitment platforms.

Point to the matching page (a store page, a product range) rather than the home page when the listing allows it.

Links in bios and pinned posts are updated by hand. Older posts will keep the old addresses: the redirect of each shared page is what protects them. The same goes for what circulates outside the web: automated emails, signatures, PDF documents, printed QR codes, ad links, whose final URL must also be changed so you do not pay for a redirect on every click.

The site's Organization (or LocalBusiness) markup describes the company: its website address, its logo, and in sameAs its official profiles. Carry it over to the new site with the new addresses of the logo and pages, and check it with Google's Rich Results Test.

A domain change adds a step: register the new property in Search Console, then use the Change of Address tool once the page-to-page redirects from the old domain to the new one are in place. Keep the old domain and its redirects for a long time: see should you renew the old domain name and how long to keep a redirect.

List the pages that receive links before the migration and make them priority URLs in your redirect plan. Prepare the listing and profile updates during acceptance testing, and apply them on go-live day, once the new addresses are served. In the following weeks, check that the pages that received links do redirect to their new page, and follow up with the sites that have not updated their links. The link between these redirects and the popularity passed on is detailed in PageRank and website migration.