Case studies: logs during a site migration

Case studies: logs during a site migration

What the access log caught that nobody else did.

→ Builtvisible replatform audit — watched Googlebot's 301 hits post-launch; discovered the bot still requesting 88k old URLs after 3 weeks, all chaining through 4 redirects. Flattening the chains recovered crawl and rankings stabilized.
Takeaway: migrations succeed or fail in the redirect logs.

⭐ Pick of the week — Distilled launch-day monitor — streamed live logs on cutover and caught a misconfigured rule serving 302s instead of 301s within 40 minutes, before Google recrawled at scale.
Takeaway: watch logs live on launch day, not the morning after.

→ Screaming Frog redirect-chain guide — pairs with the log view to map the chains.
Takeaway: chains are invisible until you trace each hop.