Using Majestic with Swan for a website migration
Majestic lists the pages of your site that receive links, including forgotten old addresses. Here is how to export them, import them into Swan and check that each one keeps its redirect.
Majestic is a tool specialised in link analysis, known for its Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics. For a migration it serves one precise purpose: getting the list of pages on your site that receive links, so that none is forgotten in the redirect plan. This article shows how to use it with Swan. To compare Majestic with other tools (Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush), read our article on backlink tools.
Exporting the pages that receive links
In Majestic, analyse your domain and open the list of its pages: each URL appears with the number of links and referring domains it receives, and its metrics. Export it and keep the target URL column: that is the one Swan imports. Majestic's historic index goes back further than the fresh index: it brings back old addresses that still receive links. To analyse your own site, Majestic offers access once ownership is verified; check its current terms.
Importing the URLs into Swan
In the Swan project, paste the exported URLs into the manual import, one per line, with the origin "Majestic". They receive this tag; those already in the project (found by the crawl or the Search Console) are not duplicated, they receive the tag as well. Each URL is crawled and matched with the closest page of the new site, like the others: you approve or correct the suggestion.
Checking linked pages first
In the project's URL list, filter on the "Majestic" tag to check first that every page receiving links has its redirect. It is also a chance to rediscover deleted pages that used to receive links: recreate them if their content still has a place, otherwise redirect them to the closest page. For borderline cases, see should you redirect every URL that receives links.
Checking the redirects
Swan checks each redirect on staging, then in production after go-live: it requests the old URL, follows the redirect and records the HTTP code of the page reached, which must be 200. Missing or failing redirects show up in this check, to be fixed before they cost you links.
After the migration
In the following weeks, Majestic lets you follow the site's links as it recrawls them, and check that they still lead to accessible pages. For the most valuable links, ask the sites that make them to point directly to the new address. What this means for your rankings is explained in why backlinks matter during a migration.
Import your Majestic pages into Swan: each one gets a redirect suggestion, checked before and after go-live.
