Search Marketing FAQ

There is no hard cap. Sites move thousands of URLs cleanly. What matters is each redirect being one direct hop, not a chain, and pointing to a closely matched destination. Be aware that 99% redirect coverage on the first day is realistic; the remaining edge cases get cleaned up post-launch from the 404 report.

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Use 301. A 301 tells search engines the move is permanent and passes ranking signals immediately. A 302 is for temporary moves; Google may eventually treat it as permanent but takes weeks to months. Meta refresh is server-blind, treated as 301 only for short delays. For domain changes, 301 is the only correct choice.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Map every old URL straight to its final destination, never to an intermediate URL that itself redirects. Use a crawler to identify chains over two hops and flatten them. Watch for loops where A redirects to B and B back to A. Periodic re-crawls during migration catch newly introduced chains before they ship.

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Activate 301s the moment DNS cuts to the new site, not after. Have them in code and tested on staging beforehand. If they go live late, users and Googlebot hit dead pages, traffic disappears, and you spend the recovery window fixing what should have shipped at hour zero. Treat redirect activation as the cutover itself.

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At least one year, ideally indefinitely. Backlinks, bookmarks, internal links from other sites, and AI-engine indexes all reference old URLs for years. Removing redirects too early breaks every external citation pointing at the old URL. The maintenance cost of keeping a redirect rule is near zero; the cost of removing one is permanent equity loss.

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Export the existing metadata for every page before launch (Screaming Frog will do this in one crawl). On the new site, set the same titles, meta descriptions, H1s, structured data, alt text, and canonical tags per page. Audit the staging site to catch any new CMS that overwrote defaults. Untranslated metadata kills rankings overnight.

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Each new-site page should self-canonicalize. Crawl the staging site for canonical tags pointing at old URLs, 404s, 3xx, or pages outside the new domain - all common migration bugs that strangle indexation. Conflicting canonical-plus-noindex pairs invalidate one of the two signals. Fix any non-self canonical that does not consolidate intentional duplicates.

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Three layers: password-protect the staging environment (basic auth on the server, the safest method); set robots.txt to Disallow: / for crawlers; and add `<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow'>` site-wide as a backup. Verify nothing is indexed by site:staging.example.com search. Remember to remove all three blocks before production launch.

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User-agent: * followed by Disallow: / blocks reputable crawlers from the entire site. Pair with HTTP basic auth so even disrespectful bots get a 401. Never rely on robots.txt alone: if anyone links to your staging URL, Google can still index a snippet. Password protection is the only hard block.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Crawl the staging environment with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Verify every URL returns 200, redirects work, canonicals self-reference, hreflang is intact, metadata transferred, structured data validates, and internal links point to live new-site URLs (not old or staging URLs). Test on real devices for mobile usability. Run Lighthouse for Core Web Vitals.

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Status codes (no 404s, no unintended 3xx), title tags and meta descriptions transferred, H1 hierarchy preserved, internal links point to new domain, hreflang reciprocal, canonical tags self-referencing, robots.txt prepared for production, structured data validates, XML sitemap built and submittable, redirect rules ready to switch on the moment DNS cuts.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Replace links in the content database (Search-Replace plugins for WordPress, bulk update tools for Shopify) so internal links point to new-domain URLs directly, not through 301s. Use LinkWhisper or a similar tool for WordPress. Crawl with Screaming Frog and filter for outbound URLs containing the old domain; iterate until the count is zero.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

301 every old URL to its new-domain equivalent before DNS cut. Submit the Change of Address request in Search Console. Update both XML sitemaps (old domain sitemap with redirects, new domain sitemap with live URLs). Resubmit. Keep the old domain alive and the redirects live for at least a year. Monitor coverage daily.

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301 every old URL that has incoming backlinks (run an Ahrefs or Majestic backlink export). Reach out to high-DR linking sites and ask them to update the link to the new URL directly; 301s pass equity but a direct link is stronger. Keep the redirects active even after outreach because most sites will not update.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Five recur: missing or broken 301s; redirecting everything to the homepage instead of the closest match; staging-environment indexed because robots.txt was forgotten; CMS overwrote default metadata and nobody noticed; and rushed timeline with no backup plan. Each can drop traffic 30-90% overnight. Each is preventable with a checklist and a staging audit.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Daily for two weeks, weekly for the next two months. Watch Search Console Coverage for spikes in 404s, soft 404s, or "crawled not indexed." Compare GA4 organic sessions and Search Console clicks to baseline. Track top-keyword rankings via Semrush Position Tracking. Investigate any drop over 10% within 48 hours.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Two to six weeks for most pages on a clean migration; full recovery often takes longer. A Search Engine Journal study found sites averaged 17 months to fully recover, though that includes migrations with mistakes. Simple URL changes with proper 301s recover in days; domain swaps take months.

in Site Migrations & Redirects

Three signals 60 days post-launch: total organic clicks within 95% of baseline, indexed page count steady or higher in Search Console, and top-20 ranking keywords held positions within two spots. If any of those three fails, audit redirects, internal links, metadata transfer, and structured data first. Most failures trace to one of those four.

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Alt text serves two purposes. Screen readers announce alt text so visually impaired users understand the image. Google uses it to understand image content (it cannot "see" images directly), which determines whether the image appears in Google Images and influences relevance for the page. Empty or generic alt text loses both audiences.

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Around 100-125 characters, ideally a complete sentence. Long enough to describe what's pictured and how it relates to the page, short enough that screen readers read it without pause. Avoid keyword stuffing - one to two relevant terms naturally placed is the limit. Empty alt="" is correct for decorative images, never for content images.

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A concrete description of what the image shows, in context. For a product photo: "Black leather laptop bag with adjustable shoulder strap, shown open with laptop inside." Include named entities (people, brands, products) when relevant. Skip "image of" or "picture of" - screen readers already announce that. Include color, action, and context.

in Image SEO

For purely decorative images that add no meaning to the page: icons next to a label, background flourishes, dividers, spacer images. Use alt="" (empty quotes) so screen readers skip them without saying "unlabeled image." Never omit the alt attribute entirely; that triggers a screen-reader fallback that reads the file path.

in Image SEO

Yes. Google can detect keyword-stuffed alt text and treats it as a spam signal that risks the page-level helpful-content score. The fix is descriptive accuracy. One naturally placed keyword is fine; jamming a target term and three variants into the alt attribute looks artificial to Google and worthless to screen readers.

in Image SEO

WebP for almost all photos and graphics: smaller files than JPEG/PNG, browser support is universal, and Google explicitly favors faster pages. AVIF is 20% smaller than WebP but Safari support is recent and encoding is 5-10x slower. SVG for icons and logos that need to scale. PNG only when transparency is essential.

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