The ,000 Redirect My Client Forgot to Map
The $47,000 Redirect My Client Forgot to Map I watched a client lose half their organic traffic in 72 hours. Not because their new website was bad. It was beautiful—clean design, fast load times, mobile responsive, the whole package. The problem was invisible to everyone who approved the launch. Every URL had changed. And nobody had mapped where the old ones should point. Within three days, Google started dropping pages from the index. Within two weeks, their lead flow dried up. The math was brutal—this particular client generated about $47,000 per month from organic search traffic. Most of that evaporated because they failed to preserve the connection between what Google knew and where it actually lived. This wasn’t a theoretical problem. I had to call them and explain that their investment in a new website had just destroyed most of their digital equity. That conversation taught them more about the gap between design execution and technical continuity than any certification course ever could. The Pattern I Keep Seeing Here’s what happens in most website redesign projects. A business decides they need a new website. The current one feels dated, or it doesn’t reflect where they’re headed, or a competitor just launched something that makes theirs look amateur. All valid reasons. They hire a designer or agency. Mockups get created. Revisions happen. Everyone focuses on visual hierarchy, color psychology, conversion optimization, user experience. The new site gets built in a staging environment. It looks incredible. Then launch day arrives. The old site comes down. The new site goes up. And if you’re lucky, someone remembered to set up basic redirects for the homepage and maybe a few major pages. But the deep pages—the ones that have been accumulating backlinks and ranking for long-tail keywords for years? Those often get left behind….
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