How can SEO be protected during a website rebuild or migration?

Start by crawling and inventorying every indexable URL. Identify top-performing pages and queries. Map one-to-one 301 redirects for any URL changes. Preserve intent and key on-page elements on ranking pages. QA on staging with noindex, then monitor indexation and rankings closely post-launch.

Start by crawling and inventorying every indexable URL on the current site. Identify your top-performing pages and the queries driving organic traffic to them. These are the pages you cannot afford to lose equity on.

For any URL that changes, map one-to-one 301 redirects from the old path to the new one. On pages that already rank, preserve the intent and key on-page elements — don't rewrite a page that ranks for "B2B website agency" into something completely different. QA everything on a staging environment with noindex in place so search engines don't crawl unfinished work. After launch, monitor indexation, crawl errors, and rankings closely for the first 4–6 weeks. Most SEO damage from migrations is caused by missed redirects, broken internal links, or accidental noindex tags left on production pages.