Keeping your backlinks through a website redesign

A redesign does not remove your backlinks. Every link still sits on someone else's page, exactly as it was. What changes is your side: the URL those links point at stops answering. The other site still believes it is linking to you, and nobody there will notice.

This is the opposite of the usual case, where a link disappears from someone else's site. Here the link survives and the destination is what broke, which means it is entirely within your control, before and after. It is the one part of the backlink subject that depends on nobody but you.

Before: know what you are about to move

List the URLs that actually receive links. Not your best traffic pages: the pages other sites chose to reference. The two lists overlap less than people expect, and the second is the one that matters here. It is built from your link tracking, from Search Console, and from your server logs, where visits arriving from outside are recorded.

Keep the URL when you can. The cheapest migration is the one that does not change addresses. If a page is only being restyled, there is rarely a good reason for its URL to move, and "the new addresses are prettier" is not one.

Write the mapping before the build, not after. Old URL, new URL, one line each. Done at the end, under pressure, it becomes a redirect to the homepage.

Warn the partners who matter. Five or six messages, not fifty: the ones whose link cost you time. A message sent before the redesign gets the URL updated; the same message sent afterwards gets a polite silence.

During: the redirect rules that matter

• 301, page to equivalent page. Not to the homepage, not to a category. A reader clicked a specific reference and should land on the thing referenced.
• One hop. Old URL to new URL. Chains of three redirects survive migrations badly and get truncated by the next person cleaning up.
• No page without an equivalent? Then a 404 is honest. A redirect to a vaguely related page is worse than nothing for the reader who clicked.
• Watch the details that break silently. Each of them produces a different URL, and therefore a dead link.

After: verify, do not assume

Take the list of pages that receive links and open them through the old addresses. Not the new site map: the exact URLs other people published. Each should answer 200 after a single redirect.

Then keep watching for a few weeks. The failure mode here is specific: a site owner notices your link is broken and, rather than write to you, simply removes it. You have then lost a link you could have kept by fixing a redirect in the first week: which is exactly what monitoring catches, provided it was in place before launch rather than after.

The check-list, in order

A month later the subject is closed. What breaks after that has nothing to do with the redesign, and treating it as a redesign problem sends you looking in the wrong place. Keep the file anyway: the next rebuild, in three or four years, will be run by people who were not there, and this list is the only thing that will tell them what mattered.

The pages you genuinely do remove

Not every page survives a redesign, and that is fine. The question is not to save everything: it is to know which one you are removing. A page with no inbound links, no traffic and no interest disappears at no cost. A page cited three times by other sites deserves to be kept, even in reduced form, if only to receive the readers who will still arrive in two years.

And if you take the opportunity to rename pages, remember that the anchors published by others describe the old version: anchor text is a promise made to the reader, and a page that changes subject while changing address breaks that promise even when the redirect works perfectly.

The three redesigns that cost the most

They are not all equal. Three of them deserve noticeably more preparation than the rest.

Changing the domain name. Every URL changes at once, including the ones you had forgotten. It is the only case where the redirect must be maintained indefinitely: a domain dropped after two years takes the whole link history with it, and it is often bought by someone else afterwards, which turns your old backlinks into links to a site you no longer control.

Moving to a CMS that imposes its URL structure. Hosted platforms often decide the shape of your addresses, and that shape is almost never the one you had. The question to ask before signing is not "can I keep my URLs" but "can I write my own redirects", and the answer is sometimes no.

Removing an entire section. A blog shut down, documentation retired, a client area closed. This is where the temptation to redirect everything to the homepage is strongest, and where it costs the most, because a whole section often concentrates the majority of the links you ever received.

In those three cases, preparation is counted in weeks rather than days, and the list of URLs that receive links gets read twice.

The mistake worth naming

Redirects get removed "to clean up" a year or two later, by someone who was not there for the migration and sees a config file full of rules for pages that no longer exist. Those rules are the only thing keeping years of accumulated links attached to your site. Keep them, and leave a comment saying why.

It is also why it pays to keep a written record of your links somewhere other than in the head of the person who ran the redesign: a spreadsheet is enough, and it is what it does best.

What this check-list does not cover

It deals with backlinks, meaning the links other people gave you. A redesign also breaks your internal links, the absolute URLs written inside your article bodies, your navigation and your sitemap, which is a separate and at least as large a job: the migration link check-list covers that half. The two run at the same time, with the same people, and are all the easier to confuse because they break on the same day.