Playbook: watch crawl behavior after a launch or migration

Playbook: watch crawl behavior after a launch or migration
A monitoring routine assembled from migration veterans.
→ Google's site-move doc — expect a crawl spike on new URLs, then decay. Takeaway: baseline your pre-launch bot hit-rate so you can spot the spike resolving.
→ tail -f + grep Googlebot — live watch on the new section the day of cutover. Takeaway: confirm bots are reaching new URLs within hours, not days.
★ Pick of the week — Jon Earnshaw's post-migration log checklist — track bot hits on old vs new URLs daily until old-URL crawling fades. Takeaway: persistent crawling of old URLs means your redirects aren't being discovered.
→ GoAccess in real-time mode — a live dashboard for the war-room week. Takeaway: keep it open through the risky window.
Watch the old-URL crawl curve fall — that's your migration's health signal in logs.