Repair guide
Reclaim old backlinks after moving your blog
A platform switch, a new theme or a changed permalink structure can quietly strand years of links. Here is how to spot the damage and win most of it back.
Seven red flags that a migration broke your links
Any one of these is a reason to open your crawler before you open your wallet.
Traffic fell the week you moved
A cliff the same week as the migration points to redirects, not to a slow content problem.
Search Console shows a 404 spike
The Pages report lists URLs Google tried and failed to fetch. Group them by folder.
Old posts lose the date folder
/2019/04/post-name became /post-name, and nothing maps the old path to the new one.
Everything redirects to the home page
A blanket redirect looks tidy and tells Google very little about which page replaced which.
HTTP and HTTPS both answer
Two live versions split the signals. Pick one and redirect the other.
A staging site got indexed
A copy of the blog on a test subdomain competes with the real one.
Image and PDF URLs changed
Links to your files break first and get noticed last.
What a redirect map does and does not recover
A 301 redirect tells browsers and Google that a page has moved for good. Used well, it passes most of the old URL's value to the new one, although Google gives no figure and results vary.
That uncertainty is why we call this a repair and not a promise. Some owners see rankings return within weeks; others see nothing because the content itself had aged out.
Our own crawler and our own index find these cases often: a blog that once held fifty strong links, of which only a handful still resolve to a live page. Fixing those is cheap, and cheaper than replacing them.
If you have not yet listed what the blog owns, do the backlink audit first so the map targets the right pages.
A redirect map for a hypothetical blog
| Old URL | Status now | Redirect to | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| /2018/06/cast-iron-care | 404 | /cast-iron-care-guide | Same topic, updated |
| /2019/02/best-skillets | 404 | /best-skillets | Same post, new path |
| /category/recipes | 200 but empty | /recipes | Category rebuilt |
| /2017/11/kitchen-tour | 404 | /about | No matching post left |
| /wp-content/uploads/care-chart.pdf | 404 | /downloads/care-chart.pdf | File moved |
The repair order that costs least
- 1
List dead URLs with links
Join the referring-domain export to your crawl and keep only 404s that have at least one link.
- 2
Match each to the closest live page
Closest in topic, not closest in the menu. A redirect to the home page is the last resort.
- 3
Add the redirects at server level
In nginx, Apache or your host's panel. A WordPress plugin works, though it adds a database lookup to every request.
- 4
Ask for the easy wins
For the five best linking pages, email the editor with the new URL. Some update the link and some do not.
- 5
Re-crawl in two weeks
Confirm the redirects return 301 and land on a 200.
Questions from owners who moved platforms
I moved from Blogger to WordPress. Did I lose my links?
Possibly some. Blogger URLs end in .html and carry a year and month folder, so each needs a redirect. Blogger itself can redirect the old address for a limited time, but you should rebuild the map on your own server.
Is changing the permalink structure ever worth it?
Seldom on a blog that already has links. A tidier URL does not outweigh the cost of mapping every old path. If you must change it, redirect every post individually and test thirty of them by hand.
Can I still use the old domain's links after a rebrand?
Yes, if you redirect the old domain to the new one page by page and keep it renewed. Let the old domain lapse and the links point nowhere, so the value goes with it.
When does it make sense to buy links instead?
When the audit shows few survivors and the repaired pages are already strong. Then a small basket can add relevant mentions to the pages you chose to keep.