Chapter 21 — Quiz

Twenty-four self-check questions: sixteen multiple choice, then eight short answer. Answer them before you open the key at the bottom. This quiz tests the redirect discipline, the go-live catastrophe, and — the judgment the chapter exists to build — telling a normal dip from a real emergency.

Part 1 — Multiple choice

Q1. Which of these is a site migration? - A. Changing your domain name - B. Moving from HTTP to HTTPS - C. Redesigning your templates with the same URLs - D. All of the above

Q2. The correct redirect for a permanent move during a migration is: - A. A 302 (temporary) redirect - B. A 301 (permanent) redirect - C. A JavaScript redirect - D. A meta-refresh redirect

Q3. The single most important reason a 301 is the right redirect for a migration is that it: - A. Loads faster than a 302 - B. Passes the old URL's ranking signals to the new URL - C. Is easier to implement - D. Hides the old URL from users

Q4. Redirecting every old URL to the new homepage is a mistake because Google: - A. Bans sites that do it - B. Treats an irrelevant redirect as a soft 404 and passes along no ranking signals - C. Charges a fee to process the redirects - D. Doubles the site's crawl budget

Q5. A redirect chain is: - A. A redirect that points to the homepage - B. A URL that redirects to a URL that itself redirects (A→B→C) - C. A list of all a site's redirects - D. A redirect that loops back on itself

Q6. The single most catastrophic migration mistake described in the chapter is: - A. Using a 301 instead of a 302 - B. Launching on a Tuesday - C. Letting the staging site's noindex / robots block ship to production - D. Forgetting to update the copyright year

Q7. A URL inventory should be built by: - A. A single crawl of the homepage - B. Combining a crawler, sitemaps, Search Console, analytics, logs, and backlink data - C. Asking the developer which pages exist - D. Copying the navigation menu

Q8. In the URL inventory, which pages deserve the most fierce protection? - A. The newest pages - B. The pages with the most words - C. The pages with external backlinks (off-site authority) - D. The pages in the main menu

Q9. A redirect loop (A→B→A) results in: - A. Slightly slower loading - B. A page that is permanently unreachable - C. A small ranking boost - D. A duplicate-content warning

Q10. Why is an HTTP-to-HTTPS migration relatively lower risk despite changing every URL? - A. Google ignores HTTPS migrations - B. The mapping is perfectly mechanical (every http://X → https://X), requiring no judgment - C. HTTPS pages can't lose rankings - D. No redirects are needed

Q11. After a migration, your internal links should point to: - A. The old URLs, which redirect to the new ones - B. The new URLs directly, in one hop - C. The homepage - D. Whichever the CMS chooses

Q12. During the gap between old URLs disappearing and redirects going live, Google sees: - A. Nothing unusual - B. Your crown-jewel URLs returning 404 (not found), en masse - C. A temporary ranking boost - D. The new URLs automatically

Q13. A dip in traffic for the first one to four weeks after a clean migration, followed by recovery, is: - A. A sign the migration failed - B. Normal — the visible shape of Google reprocessing the change - C. Proof the redirects are broken - D. A reason to roll the migration back immediately

Q14. Which of the following is an "act today" emergency, not a "wait and monitor" situation? - A. Rankings wobbling ± a few positions - B. New URLs indexing as old ones drop out - C. The whole site dropping out of the index / "Excluded by noindex" climbing - D. A dip that is flattening

Q15. For a domain change (but not a same-domain redesign), which Search Console tool applies? - A. The Disavow tool - B. The Change of Address tool - C. The Removals tool - D. The Rich Results Test

Q16. The honest promise a practitioner can make about a well-run migration is: - A. "Zero traffic loss, guaranteed" - B. "Rankings will improve immediately" - C. "We'll protect the equity, minimize the dip, recover fast, and know within days if something broke" - D. "You'll rank #1 after launch"

Part 2 — Short answer

Q17. Name the five kinds of migration and rank them by risk, highest to lowest.

Q18. State the governing rule of a redirect map in one sentence, and explain what "closest equivalent" means.

Q19. Why should you baseline traffic and rankings before a migration? Name two questions you cannot answer afterward without a baseline.

Q20. Explain how a redirect chain forms across successive migrations, and give the one-rule fix.

Q21. Give the first line of a go-live checklist and explain why it is not "check the redirects."

Q22. State the myth this chapter is required to bust about traffic loss, and give the honest standard for grading a migration instead.

Q23. A robots.txt Disallow and a noindex tag both "hide" a page — but they are different tools with a dangerous interaction. Explain the difference and the trap. (Recall from Chapter 14.)

Q24. Give the evidence-tiered answer to "How long until we recover?" — naming what Google confirms and what no one can honestly promise.

Answer key (try every question first) **Part 1 — Multiple choice** 1. **D** — all of them are migrations; a redesign counts even with unchanged URLs. 2. **B** — a 301 (permanent). 3. **B** — it passes the old URL's ranking signals to the new one. 4. **B** — Google treats the irrelevant redirect as a soft 404 and passes no signals. 5. **B** — A→B→C, a redirect to a redirect. 6. **C** — the staging noindex / robots block shipping to production (the Chapter 1 catastrophe). 7. **B** — triangulate from many sources, because no single one knows every URL. 8. **C** — the pages with external backlinks, where off-site authority lives. 9. **B** — a permanently unreachable page. 10. **B** — the mapping is mechanical and requires no judgment (low judgment = low risk). 11. **B** — the new URLs directly, in one hop. 12. **B** — the old crown-jewel URLs returning 404 en masse. 13. **B** — normal; it's Google reprocessing. 14. **C** — whole-site deindexing / "Excluded by noindex" is an emergency; A, B, and D are normal. 15. **B** — the Change of Address tool (domain moves only). 16. **C** — protect equity, minimize the dip, recover fast, know quickly if something broke. **Part 2 — Short answer** 17. Highest to lowest: **(1) Domain change** (whole address changes; trust must transfer), **(2) Consolidation/restructure** (many pages moved or dropped), **(3) CMS/platform change** (URLs + templates + markup change; silent element loss), **(4) Redesign** (usually no URL change, but content/links/schema can vanish and the staging noindex can ship), **(5) HTTP→HTTPS** (every URL changes but the mapping is mechanical). Accept minor reordering of 2–4 if justified; domain change is highest and a clean HTTPS move is lowest. 18. Rule: **map every old URL to its single closest equivalent on the new site — the page serving the same content and search intent — with a 301, and never default to the homepage.** "Closest equivalent" means the new page a searcher (and Google) would agree is the same thing: `/services/furnace-repair` → `/heating/furnace-repair`, a deleted product → its category or replacement, not the homepage. 19. Because "did the migration hurt us?" and "have we recovered?" are both unanswerable without a before-picture. Two questions needing a baseline: (a) how far did traffic/rankings actually fall relative to normal? (b) what level are we recovering *toward* — have we hit it yet, or overshot it? 20. Each migration adds a redirect layer; if every migration only ever redirects "the previous version" to "the current version," an old URL ends up hopping through http→https→old-domain→new-structure. The fix: **redirect the *original* URL directly to the *final* URL, one hop, and update old rules to skip the middlemen.** 21. First line: **"Remove the staging noindex/robots block and verify the live site is indexable."** It comes before "check the redirects" because a perfect redirect map on a `noindex`ed site still delivers every page to an index Google has been told to keep it out of — the whole site falls out regardless of how good the redirects are. 22. Myth: **"A well-planned migration has zero traffic loss; any dip means someone messed up."** Honest standard: grade a migration on **recovery — did it recover, how fast, and to what level** — not on whether traffic ever dipped, because the dip is Google reprocessing, not necessarily a mistake. 23. `robots.txt` `Disallow` blocks *crawling* but not *indexing* — Google may still list a disallowed URL it learns about from links. `noindex` tells Google to keep the page *out* of the index. The trap: Google must be able to *crawl* a page to *see* its `noindex`, so blocking the page in `robots.txt` can prevent the `noindex` from ever being read — the two instructions can cancel each other. 24. **Confirmed by Google:** site moves cause temporary fluctuations, and reprocessing takes time (longer for larger sites). **What no one can honestly promise:** a precise number of days/weeks, because it depends on site size, redirect quality, re-crawl speed, and whether a core update lands in the middle. The honest answer is a *range and a shape* — expect a dip, expect weeks (sometimes a couple of months), watch the trend — plus a check of the calendar against known updates.