<b>Q: My 301s are perfect, but should I also fix internal links?</b>

<b>Q: My 301s are perfect, but should I also fix internal links?</b>

Short answer: yes, absolutely — relying on redirects for your own internal links is sloppy and slows recovery.

Long answer: It's easy to think 'the redirect catches it, so who cares.' But every internal link still pointing at an old URL forces an unnecessary redirect hop for users and crawlers, wastes crawl budget re-following links you control, and can quietly build redirect chains. Your own navigation, footer, and in-content links should point DIRECTLY at the final new URLs.

This is the most-skipped migration step because the site 'works' — the redirects hide the problem.

Where old links hide:

— Main navigation and footer menus.
— In-content links inside old blog posts.
— Hardcoded links in templates, banners, and CTAs.

Next step: crawl your live site and look for any internal link whose destination returns a 301. Update those to the final URL. Cleaning internal links often produces a noticeable recovery bump because crawlers stop wasting effort.