After the migration:
find what broke, fix what dropped
Migrations and domain merges leave silent casualties across
the library. Here's how to find them — page by page, not in aggregate.
ORIGINAL
The meeting was very long and not useful to most people.
REFINED
The meeting ran overlong and added little value.
The migration 'went fine.' Then the long tail started bleeding
Big pages get watched. The hundreds of smaller articles are where migrations quietly lose ground
Platform replatform, domain change, HTTPS move, two sites merged into one — every migration is a controlled explosion, and the blast radius is the whole URL structure. The team watches the money pages and the top ten posts through the transition. What nobody can watch by hand is the long tail: the hundreds of articles whose redirects misfired, whose metadata dropped in the template swap, whose internal links now point into the void.
And the damage hides in the average. Site-wide traffic might dip 8% and 'recover' over a few weeks — while underneath, some articles are fine, some fell off a cliff, and a few silently 404. The aggregate looks survivable; the per-page reality is a scatter of casualties. Migration recovery is a page-level problem wearing a site-level disguise.
Migration cleanup is two jobs. Know which tool does which
The infrastructure half is a crawler's job. The content-recovery half is ours. Doing only one leaves you exposed
- Broken redirects and redirect chains — Screaming Frog, your logs
- 404s and orphaned URLs at the server level
- Sitemap, robots.txt, and canonical-tag correctness
- hreflang, HTTPS, and status-code issues
- Get this done first — it's the emergency room
- Which specific articles lost rankings and clicks post-migration
- Per-page position drops, including new page-1 exits
- Content-level metadata that dropped in the template swap: titles, metas, headings
- Internal links inside content pointing at dead or redirected pages
- The fix as a reviewed brief and draft — not just a list of casualties
THE CONTENT HALF, PAGE BY PAGE
A recovery queue —
not a panicked spreadsheet
Once the infrastructure is stable, the question is which articles actually lost ground and what each one needs. The audit answers that per page, using the performance history the migration didn't erase.
Casualties, identified individually
Per-page position and click history spanning the migration date — so you see exactly which articles dropped and by how much, not a blended site-wide number that hides the worst cases.
Content-level damage, flagged
Titles and metas that didn't survive the template migration, heading structure that broke, in-content links now pointing at redirected or dead URLs — checked per article.
Recovery as reviewed rewrites
Each damaged article gets a brief and a draft that restores what the migration cost it — keeping the (now correct) URL, reviewed and approved before it ships.
Post-migration recovery, answered
The honest answers.
Find the articles the migration quietly cost you
Book a 30-minute demo — connect GSC and see, page by page, what dropped across the migration and what each article needs to recover.
✓ 30 minutes ✓ Per-page recovery view ✓ Run your crawler first — we'll take the content half