<b>The migration that leaked 100% of its link equity</b>

<b>The migration that leaked 100% of its link equity</b>

A media company moved 12,000 articles to a new URL structure. They were proud of the redirects — every old URL forwarded to its new home. Six months later, rankings still hadn't recovered.

The redirects worked. Click an old link, you land on the new article. So we checked the HTTP response of an old URL directly with curl — and got a <code>200 OK</code> with a near-empty body.

The 'redirect' was client-side: the old URL served a stub page that ran <code>window.location = newUrl</code> in JavaScript. Users got bounced instantly. Googlebot got a 200, an empty page, and a JS redirect it treated as a weak, soft signal — not the equity-passing 301 the team thought they'd shipped.

Client-side redirects don't pass full link equity, and at scale that's a migration that silently throws away years of accumulated authority.

Fix: real server-side 301s for all 12,000 URLs.

Result: rankings recovered to within 4% of pre-migration over 13 weeks — after months of flatlining on the JS version.