LLM Best Practices

How to monitor a site migration after cutover

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Overview

The DNS flip is the midpoint of a migration, not the end. Search engines still have to discover the new URLs, process the redirects, and move ranking signals to the new addresses, and any gap in the redirect map only shows up once real crawlers and referral traffic hit it. This tutorial covers the post-cutover half of seo-migration-playbook: submitting the new URL set and watching the signals that reveal a missing redirect or a stuck index.

Prerequisites

  • A completed cutover per seo-migration-playbook, with the staging noindex header removed.
  • Verified Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools properties for the new host (and the old one, if the domain changed).
  • The pre-migration baseline: 30 days of clicks, impressions, and average position per top URL.
  • The redirect map CSV and a list of the top old URLs by traffic.

Steps

1. Submit the new sitemap to GSC and Bing

In GSC for the new property: Sitemaps > Add a new sitemap > https://example.com/sitemap.xml. In Bing Webmaster Tools: Sitemaps > Submit. In GSC for the old property: use the Change of Address tool only if the domain itself changed.

Submit the changed URLs (old and new) through indexnow to speed up discovery on Bing, Yandex, and the other participating engines. IndexNow takes URL lists, not a sitemap URL, and Google does not use it.

2. Monitor coverage and 404s daily for four weeks

Watch four signals every day for four weeks, then weekly thereafter:

  • GSC Coverage report: Errors and Excluded counts must trend down.
  • GSC Performance: total clicks and impressions trend back toward baseline. Recovery time varies by site size and crawl rate; there is no fixed window.
  • Server logs: any URL returning 404 with referrer traffic is a missing redirect; add it.
  • 301 chain detector: re-run weekly to catch new chains added by content changes.

See master-google-search-console for the GSC report layout.

Verify it worked

# 1. Top 50 URLs all return 301 -> 200 in one hop.
while read url; do
  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{redirect_url}\n" "$url"
done < top-50-old-urls.txt
 
# 2. Sitemap is fetched (GSC Sitemaps report shows "Success").
 
# 3. Aggregate clicks trend back toward baseline (house target: most of baseline by week 4;
#    a heuristic, not a Google timeline).

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