Q: Our internal links still pointed at old URLs after migration — how much did updating them help?

Q: Our internal links still pointed at old URLs after migration — how much did updating them help?

Quietly one of the highest-ROI fixes, so glad you asked.

Short answer: meaningful — internal redirects waste crawl and dilute signals.

Long answer: post-migration, a site's menus and in-content links still hit old URLs that 301-ed to new ones. Technically "working," but every internal click was a redirect hop. Roughly 11,000 internal links were affected. We rewrote them to point directly at final URLs.

GCS crawl stats showed redirect responses drop from 22% of all crawls to under 3%. Crawl budget shifted to real pages, and several deep pages that hadn't been reindexed since the move finally got picked up. Organic ticked up 7% over two months.

Next step: crawl your own site post-migration and fix any internal link that resolves via a 301 — point it straight at the destination.