Buyer guide
Website redesign without losing search equity
The redesign that hurts is the one that renames /services/web-design to /work and ships nothing in between. Google still has the old URL. People with the old link get a 404, or a homepage that pretends to be the page. Google’s site-move guide treats a path change as a move, even when the domain stays put.
Written by SiteMivo. Rules below are from Google Search Central, read 10 October 2026. They are not a ranking promise. A move can fluctuate while Google recrawls. Drafted with research assistance.
Inventory the URLs before you redraw the nav
Pull the old sitemap, the server logs, analytics, and the links you already know about. Include images and files, not only HTML. Decide one final URL for each. Pages you are deleting, and not merging, should return 404 or 410. A soft redirect of every dead URL to the homepage is how you teach Google the homepage is a duplicate of pages that no longer exist.
One hop, and keep it for a year
Use a server-side 301 or 308 from the old URL straight to the final URL. A 302 is followed, and Google does not treat the target as canonical from that redirect alone, so the old URL can remain the one shown. Googlebot can follow up to ten hops. Google still tells you not to chain them. The usual chain is an old HTTP redirect, then a www redirect, then the new path. Update internal links to the new URLs so the redirect is a safety net, not the navigation.
Do not thin the page that already earns the enquiry
Google clusters pages whose main content is the same or very similar and picks one canonical. A new template and a rewritten headline, with the same body, is still that page. Leave a duplicate cluster only when the difference is obvious. Rewrite for clarity. Do not cut the answer so the new design has more whitespace.
The new sitemap lists the new canonical URLs only. Each of those pages canonicals to itself, including the trailing slash you actually serve. If the canonical, the redirect, and the sitemap disagree, Google picks. Inspect the homepage and each renamed URL in Search Console after the real domain is verified.
Site moves, Redirects, Canonicals.
Custom websites include this map in the build. Start a project if you already have URLs worth keeping.