SEO domain migration without losing rankings: 7,600 URLs redirected at Moov

Moov is the urban fashion brand of Grupo Dabra, which runs the Dexter, Stock Center and Moov chains in Argentina. The brand needed to leave behind moovbydexter.com.ar, a domain presenting it as an extension of another.

A domain change on an online store with thousands of indexed pages puts organic traffic and the sales coming from search at risk: if one address fails to redirect, that product disappears.

And the risk is not only about rankings.

• Thousands of URLs: every product, category and filter is an address that has to be mapped.
• Measurement breaks too: if the analytics tags do not carry over, the new site is born blind.
• Risk window: a dip coinciding with a sales event is paid in revenue.

And the prior audit showed the starting point was not clean: 192 broken internal links on Moov alone.

We planned the migration step by step, with a date chosen far from sales events and everything tested in a control environment before enabling crawling.

The baseline was site clinics across the group's three ecommerce sites, run with the same framework in January 2022.

What got measured first

• Protocol, 4xx and 5xx errors, broken internal links, www and non www versions, robots.txt, duplicate content and titles, and speed.
• 161 broken internal links on Dexter, 356 on Stock Center and 192 on Moov.
• Objective and competitor discovery for each brand.

The 20 step plan

• Owners defined on both sides and a date far from sales events.
• Site backup, prior domain status assessment and robots.txt rebuilt.
• Canonical tag review and full testing in a control environment before enabling crawling.

Addresses and measurement

• Extraction of the previous domain addresses and a 301 redirect map across 7,600 URLs.
• Old domain keywords analyzed and organized into pillars, plus new ones, to preserve them on the new site.
• Verification with the client of the analytics tag transfer, which caught a faulty tag and a duplicate pixel.

Architecture and technology

• Migration executed in April 2022, with a new sitemap submitted and indexing work.
• Follow up audit, traffic and ranking monitoring, and a prioritized on site improvement list.

Learn more about SEO strategy and ecommerce development.

The store changed domain while keeping its rankings, with traffic normalized after the expected short dips.

Starting point

• Domain moovbydexter.com.ar, presenting the brand as an extension of another.
• 192 broken internal links on Moov, 161 on Dexter and 356 on Stock Center.
• Unverified analytics tags, with one faulty tag and a duplicate pixel.

Results

• Domain migrated to moov.com.ar in April 2022.
• 7,600 URLs redirected with 301s and a 20 step plan executed on schedule.
• Follow up audit with no new errors attributable to the migration.
• Traffic normalized after the expected short dips on the switch day and when the old domain was retired.

Strategic impact

• Anticipating the short dips is what separates a planned migration from one discovered broken.
• Verifying measurement alongside the redirects kept the new site from starting on wrong data.