Why Migrations Often Lead to Disputes
Site migrations are high-stakes projects. Businesses typically expect to preserve or improve rankings, but mishandled migrations can lead to dramatic traffic losses. When this happens, disagreements may arise between businesses, agencies, developers, and SEO providers over what went wrong.
Bill’s expert work in migration-related matters focuses on reconstructing the changes, evaluating their SEO impact, and explaining whether the outcomes align with what a reasonably careful migration should produce.
Pre-Migration SEO Baseline
To understand impact, it is important to know what the site’s SEO performance looked like before the migration. Bill reviews baseline analytics, search console impressions and clicks, ranking data, and site structure to establish a point of comparison.
This baseline helps determine whether traffic loss is truly unusual or within normal variation for the site and industry.
URL Mapping and Redirects
One of the most critical migration tasks is mapping old URLs to their new counterparts and implementing proper redirects. In disputes, Bill examines whether:
- High-value URLs were redirected to relevant equivalents.
- Redirects used the correct status codes (typically 301).
- Redirect chains or loops created crawling or indexing problems.
Errors in this area often have a direct and measurable impact on rankings and traffic.
Content, Metadata, and Information Architecture
Migrations often involve rewriting content, changing headings, altering metadata, or restructuring navigation. These changes can significantly shift how search engines interpret a site.
Bill compares old and new versions of key pages to identify whether important content was removed, diluted, or made harder to access. He also evaluates shifts in internal linking and page hierarchy that may affect SEO performance.
Technical Configuration and Indexing
Technical settings such as robots.txt, canonical tags, meta robots directives, XML sitemaps, and crawl rules can change during migration. In some disputes, misconfigurations in these areas are the primary cause of traffic loss.
Bill reviews these controls to determine whether key sections of the site were inadvertently blocked, canonicalized away, or omitted from sitemaps.
Timeline and Algorithm Context
Migrations do not occur in a vacuum. Search engines continuously update their algorithms, and external events may influence demand and search volume. Bill correlates migration milestones with traffic patterns, ranking changes, and relevant algorithm updates.
This timeline analysis helps distinguish between migration-related issues and broader market or algorithmic changes.
Evaluating Professional Standards
When a case involves allegations of negligence or malpractice, the question is often whether the migration planning and execution met reasonable professional standards at the time. Bill considers documentation, plans, testing procedures, and communication around the launch.
He then explains how those actions compare to widely accepted migration best practices for SEO.
Next Steps for Migration Disputes
For migration-related matters, collecting old and new site versions, redirect maps, project documentation, and analytics exports is essential. The Attorney Checklist outlines helpful items to gather early.
When you are ready to talk through a specific migration or redesign issue, please use the Contact page to request a case review.