Chapter 21 — Exercises

Work these in order; they climb from recall to real diagnosis and planning. Several assume a live browser and, ideally, a website you can inspect (your own, your employer's, or a client's) plus two free tools: Google Search Console (search.google.com/search-console) and the free tier of Screaming Frog SEO Spider (up to 500 URLs). Nothing here costs anything. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in Appendix — Answers to Selected Exercises; odd-numbered items are worked there too. Attempt every item before you look.

A reminder in the spirit of the chapter: a migration is graded not on whether traffic ever dipped, but on whether the equity was protected and the recovery was fast. Plan for the dip; prevent the catastrophe.

A. Recall and vocabulary

Exercise 21.1 — Name the five kinds of site migration, and give a one-line example of each.

Exercise 21.2 — Define site migration in your own words, and explain why a redesign that keeps every URL the same still counts as one.

Exercise 21.3 — What is a URL inventory, and name four different sources you would combine to build a complete one (and say what each source uniquely contributes).

Exercise 21.4 † — Define a 301 redirect. State the two properties that make it the correct redirect for a permanent migration, and contrast it with a 302.

Exercise 21.5 — What is a redirect chain? Draw (in text) a three-hop chain and the clean single hop that should replace it.

Exercise 21.6 — Define staging site and explain, in one sentence, why staging is both indispensable and the source of the most catastrophic migration mistake.

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 21.7 — The chapter ranks an HTTP-to-HTTPS migration as lower risk than a redesign, even though HTTPS changes every URL and a redesign changes none. Explain the apparent paradox using the idea that "risk is about judgment required, not amount changed."

Exercise 21.8 — A company plans to simultaneously rebrand to a new domain, switch from WordPress to a custom platform, and redesign the templates — all in one launch. Give the one-sentence argument for not doing all three at once, and describe the sequenced alternative.

Exercise 21.9 † — Explain why Google treats a redirect from a specific old page to the homepage as a soft 404, and what, precisely, is lost when it does. Why is this worse than doing nothing?

Exercise 21.10 — "A 301 passes 100% of link equity, so a migration can't lose rankings." Identify the half of this sentence that is true and the half that is misleading, and rewrite it as an honest claim.

Exercise 21.11 — Redirects are described as "a safety net for external links, not a substitute for fixing your own." Explain what goes wrong if a migrated site relies on redirects for its internal navigation.

Exercise 21.12 — Why does even a flawless migration usually cause a temporary traffic dip? Ground your answer in the "burst of change" idea and the crawl→render→index→rank pipeline from Chapter 1.

Exercise 21.13 — A stakeholder wants to launch the new site the Friday before the biggest sale of the year "so it's fresh for the campaign." Give two separate reasons this is a dangerous choice, one about the day and one about the season.

Exercise 21.14 — Explain why the redirects must be live at the instant of launch rather than added "once the site is stable." What does Google see during the gap, and why is the damage sometimes lasting?

C. Diagnose the broken migration

For each symptom, name the most likely cause and whether it is a "wait and monitor" situation or an "act today" emergency. Some have more than one defensible reading — say why.

Exercise 21.15 † — Two days after launch, organic traffic is not dipping — it is gone, essentially zero, and Search Console shows "Excluded by noindex" climbing fast across the whole site. Cause? Wait or act?

Exercise 21.16 † — Three weeks after a clean domain move, traffic is down about 15% from baseline, rankings are wobbling ± a few positions, and the dip appears to be flattening rather than deepening. Cause? Wait or act?

Exercise 21.17 — Ten days post-launch, Search Console's Pages report shows a spike of 60 "Not found (404)" errors, all old blog URLs, while the rest of the site is indexing normally. Cause? Wait or act?

Exercise 21.18 — A month after a migration, the old URLs are still indexed and ranking, and the new URLs are barely indexed at all. What does this pattern tell you about the redirects, and what do you check?

Exercise 21.19 — After a redesign (same URLs), a set of previously strong pages has slipped in rankings, but nothing is 404ing and the site is fully indexed. Name two redesign-specific causes the chapter warns about, and how you would confirm each.

Exercise 21.20 — Traffic dropped sharply the same week the migration launched — and the same week Google announced a core update was rolling out. Describe how you would try to separate the two causes, and why timing is "the cheapest diagnostic you have."

D. On your own site (use a free tool)

Exercise 21.21 † — Build the start of a real URL inventory. In Google Search Console, open the Performance report, set the range to the last 12 months, export by Page, and sort by clicks. Record your top 20 pages. Then, for the top 5, note their average position. This ranked list is the spine of any migration plan for your site — the URLs you would defend first. Write one sentence naming the single URL you could least afford to lose and why.

Exercise 21.22 — Crawl your own site with the free Screaming Frog (or any crawler). Compare the count of URLs the crawl finds to the count of indexed pages Search Console reports. If they differ substantially, list two reasons a crawl might miss URLs that a migration must still account for (hint: §21.2 on orphans).

Exercise 21.23 — Pick any three of your own live pages and, in Search Console's URL Inspection tool, check for each: Is the URL on Google? and What is the Google-selected canonical? Record the results. This is the exact 40-second check you would run on your crown jewels the morning after a launch — practice it now.

Exercise 21.24 — Find one internal link on your site that currently points to a URL which then redirects (a redirect hop inside your own navigation or content). Use your crawler's "Redirect chains" or "Response codes" report. If you find none, say how you confirmed it; if you find some, name the fix.

E. Read the report / map

Exercise 21.25 † — Interpret this redirect-map excerpt and flag every problem.

FIGURE E.21a — "A redirect map with four mistakes"              [constructed teaching example]
  OLD URL                        NEW URL                    CODE   NOTE
  /services/drain-cleaning       /                          301    "closest match"
  /blog/2020-winter-tips         /blog/2022-winter-tips     302    updated post
  /ac-repair-northgate           /cooling/ac-repair         301    dropped the city
  /old-quote-form                /new-quote-form            301    (new-quote-form returns 404)

For each row, say what is wrong and what the correct treatment would be.

Exercise 21.26 — Interpret this day-7 monitoring snapshot and give a prioritized, two-item action list.

FIGURE E.21b — "Migration watch, day 7"                        [constructed teaching example]
  New site indexed: 120 of ~400 (climbing).   Old site indexed: falling (expected).
  GSC "Not found (404)": 214 and rising.       Organic clicks: down ~55% and still falling.
  Priority rankings: several crown-jewel terms not in top 100 anymore.  Conversions: down ~50%.

Is this the "normal" column or the "emergency" column? What are the first two things you do, and in what order?

F. Myths, ethics, and judgment

Exercise 21.27 — Spot the myth. A migration agency's pitch deck reads: "Our proven process guarantees zero traffic loss — if you follow our checklist, your rankings will not drop at all." Identify the two separate false or unsupportable claims in that sentence and replace each with what an honest practitioner would say.

Exercise 21.28 — A developer, under deadline, proposes redirecting all 4,000 old blog URLs to the new blog's homepage "because writing individual redirects would take days, and Google will sort it out." Make the business case against this in three sentences a non-technical owner would understand.

Exercise 21.29 † — Ethics/risk judgment. A client wants to migrate their whole site to a new domain this week because a competitor just launched a rebrand and they "don't want to look behind." No inventory exists, the redirect map isn't built, and it's two weeks before their peak season. Write the honest recommendation you would give — including what you would refuse to do and why — and one alternative that respects both the SEO risk and the client's urgency.

Exercise 21.30 — The chapter says to "grade migrations on recovery, not on a flat launch week." Construct a short argument for why judging a migration by "did traffic ever dip?" can reward a worse practitioner than one whose migration dipped and fully recovered.

G. The Strategy File (Rivertown Home Services)

Exercise 21.31 — Rivertown is changing its WordPress theme (a same-domain, same-CMS redesign). Name the two risks the chapter says kill this specific kind of migration, and the single starred checklist item that prevents the worse of the two.

Exercise 21.32 — Do Rivertown's Chapter 21 Strategy-File task on your own (or a client's) site: assume a redesign is coming. Produce (a) a baseline export of your top 20 pages from Search Console, (b) a one-page pre-launch audit list of the on-page elements a new design could silently drop (titles, headings, internal links, schema, alt text), and (c) a three-phase go-live checklist with the "verify the site is indexable on production" item starred at the top. Do not migrate anything; the deliverable is the plan and the baseline.

Where these go next. Keep your answers to 21.21, 21.23, 21.31, and 21.32 — they are the migration page of your running Strategy File (Appendix C's worksheet). You will fold the baseline and checklist into the full technical audit in Chapter 38 and the complete strategy in Chapter 40.