SEO migration for company websites in Germany

What an SEO migration is

An SEO migration is the part of a website move that keeps the site findable. Search engines have stored your old addresses, their titles and the links that point to them. A move changes part of that or the whole of it, and each change needs an answer on the new site.

I treat the move as a data migration. The records are your addresses. Each one needs a target, a title, a description and its structured data. An address without a target ends on an error page, and the visitor who came from search leaves.

When a move puts your rankings at risk

A new system often brings a new address pattern. An address such as /?p=123 becomes /services/, or /products/item.html becomes /products/item/. A new domain changes each address at once. A redesign that keeps the addresses can still drop the text, the headings or the internal links a page ranked with.

The SEO migration checklist

The order I work in, from the first crawl to the weeks after the launch. You can use it for your own move.

Before the move

1. Crawl the old site and save the result: each address with its status, title, description, main heading, canonical link and structured data.
2. Add the addresses from the sitemap and from the server logs of recent months. A crawl misses pages that no other page links to anymore.
3. Mark the pages that bring visitors from search, from your web analytics or from the referrers in the logs.
4. Assign each old address to one new address. Where a page goes away, pick the closest replacement or mark it as permanently removed.
5. Include pictures and PDF files. Other sites link to them too.
6. Write the forwarding list in the format of the new server and test it at the test address.
7. Crawl the new site at its test address and compare the result with the saved crawl of the old site.
8. Keep the test address closed to search engines.

On launch day

1. Switch the domain or the server, and lift the block for search engines on the new site.
2. Run the forwarding list against the live domain. Each old address forwards once, straight to its target, without a chain of forwardings.
3. Test the addresses with and without “www” and with and without the slash at the end.
4. Check that robots.txt names the new sitemap and blocks no page the old site allowed.
5. Crawl the live site and compare the result with the crawl of the test address.

In the weeks after

1. Read the server logs for requests to old addresses that end on an error page, and add their forwarding.
2. Compare the visits from search per page with the weeks before the move.
3. Measure the main page types with Lighthouse and fix what got slower.
4. Ask the sites that send you the most visitors, as the referrers in the logs show, to update their links.
5. Keep the forwarding and the old domain in place, with no end date.

Sites I have moved

This site ran on WordPress until September 2026. Now it is a static Astro build, and the server delivers plain HTML. Claude did much of the migration work as a coding agent, under rules that a machine checks before each change. I reviewed the result.

I built the websites of an insurance group, and they went through several launches and relaunches. Until December 2021 I managed more than 100 top-level domains there. An information portal on Frankfurt’s construction projects, where I was editor in chief, reached more than one million readers a year by January 2024.

I have worked on search engine optimization and conversion optimization for more than ten years. In a recent client project I optimized a website for search and conversions, and for the AI agents that read it.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, an IT expert for data platforms in Frankfurt, with more than twenty years in IT and media. I set up and run the Linux servers under the sites I build, so I write and test forwarding rules myself. Today AI agents speed up my work: Claude and Codex write the code, and I review each result.