Where they started
We came in after the emergency, not before it. The client had replatformed onto a new stack and the agency running it never exported the redirect map, so ~1,900 old product and category URLs had been returning hard 404s for six weeks. Traffic sat at 6.4k a month, down 58% from a pre-migration baseline near 15k. The tell was in the logs: Googlebot was still hitting the dead old URLs hundreds of times a day and getting nothing back.
The diagnosis: this wasn’t a rankings problem, it was a plumbing problem. Authority was being sent to URLs that no longer resolved.
What we did
- Rebuilt the redirect map from our own crawl exports and Wayback snapshots. We reconstructed 1,900 old-to-new mappings so link equity stopped leaking into 404s.
- Restored internal-link parity. The new theme had dropped half the old cross-links, so category and collection pages were orphaned; we re-wired them to match the old graph.
- Verified the recovery in server logs, not dashboards: we watched Googlebot re-crawl the redirect chains and confirmed the 404 rate fall to near zero before touching anything else.
- Only then resumed growth work: 34 links from specialty-food and recipe publications, plus content on the highest-converting categories.
Most of the lost equity returned within about two crawl cycles, which is what the sharp lift in months one to four shows. The steady climb after that is real growth on top of a fully recovered base. Honest note: the long-tail pages that sat dead for six weeks didn’t all come back. Some of those rankings were reassigned and stayed gone.