Skip to content
LinkSkimmr
Log inGet $100 free
LinkSkimmrSign up

Mistakes and fixes

Six migration mistakes that strand a client's backlinks

Most link loss in a client file is not a penalty. It is an old URL that stopped answering when the site moved, and the top-pages report shows it in a minute.

LinkSkimmr research team ·

Where the links go when a site moves

Links point at URLs, not at sites. Change the URL and every link to the old one needs a forward.

Obvious, until a move ships. A WordPress migration, a switch from www to the bare domain or a new category structure goes live on a Friday with a note saying redirects will follow. When you check backlink of a site after such a move, the question is never how many links exist, but how many still land on a live page, and field five of the ten-minute routine answers it.

Google's own guidance for moves is a one-to-one map of old URLs to new ones using server-side 301 redirects, kept in place as long as you can. For a domain change, the Change of Address tool in Search Console is an extra step. Maps still break in predictable ways, and Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit will surface most of them.

Tools help here: Search Console shows crawl and coverage on Google's side, Screaming Frog lists redirect chains from a crawl, and our top-pages call shows which URLs carry the links. None of them alone gives the full picture, and the combination takes under an hour on a small site.

Mistake, symptom, fix

MistakeHow it shows in the dataFix
Everything redirected to the home pageTop linked pages are all gone; home is the only URL leftMap each old URL to its closest new page
www and bare domain both answer 200Same links split across two hostsPick one host, 301 the other
Redirect chain of three or more hopsTop page resolves only after several jumpsPoint the old URL straight at the final one
302 used for a permanent moveOld URL keeps appearing as the linked pageSwitch to 301 once the move is final
Old 'about' page deleted, not forwardedA well-linked URL returns 404Forward it to the new about page
Category structure rebuilt without a mapDozens of linked URLs return 404Export old URLs first, map them in a sheet

Find the stranded value in two calls

Pull the most linked pages, then test each URL in a browser or with curl -I. Anything that is not a clean 200 or a single 301 goes on the list.

bash
# which old URLs carry the links (2 credits, billed once)
curl "https://linkskimmr.com/api.php?action=toppages&q=clientsite.com&per=200&key=sk_live_..."

# then, for each URL you care about
curl -sI https://clientsite.com/old-page | head -5

The repair order we would use

  1. 1

    Fix the host first

    One canonical host, everything else 301s to it. It takes minutes and touches every link at once.

  2. 2

    Map the top twenty URLs

    Twenty well-linked pages usually hold most of the value. Map those by hand, one to one.

  3. 3

    Flatten chains

    Replace every multi-hop path with a single hop to the final URL.

  4. 4

    Re-check next month

    Our index refreshes roughly monthly, so give it a cycle before you declare the repair a success or a failure.

A limit worth saying aloud

Fixing redirects returns link value to a live page. It does not promise rankings, and it cannot recover links that were removed at the source. Note both in the client file.

Redirect questions we hear most

Can I just redirect the old page to the new about page?

Yes, when the new page serves the same purpose. A 301 from the old URL to the closest equivalent keeps the links useful. Sending every dead URL to the home page works poorly because the destination no longer matches what the link promised.

How many 301 redirects are too many on one site?

The count matters less than the shape of each path. Long chains waste crawl effort and break more often, so keep every old URL to a single hop and keep the full map in a spreadsheet you can audit.

How do I send www to the non-www version?

Choose one host as canonical, then add a site-wide 301 from the other host to it at the server or DNS provider. Test both versions with curl -I, and confirm that links in the top-pages list land on the chosen host.

A worked example, hypothetical

Take a client who moved from an old blog theme to a new one in January 2026. Example numbers only.

Before the move, the top-pages report listed 140 URLs with links; afterwards, 90 of them returned 404 because the new permalink pattern dropped the date folder. Mapping the twenty best-linked of those, by hand, restores most of the pointed value in an afternoon, and the threshold table tells you how to describe the change to the client.