Built for Todd Beyer · LoKation Real Estate

Todd — site consolidation without losing rankings or traffic.

You asked publicly. Here's the actual playbook — written real-time after I saw your post.

No "let's hop on a discovery call." No agency proposal. Just the practical version of how I'd run a real estate site consolidation, what kills SEO when it goes wrong, and what receipts I have.

The 5 things that kill SEO during a site migration

1. Missing or broken 301 redirects

Old URL → new URL must redirect with a permanent 301, not 302, not a JS redirect. Every old page you don't redirect = a Google ranking that drops to zero overnight.

Fix: full URL inventory of every old site → mapped to new URL → 301 redirect map shipped at cutover. Test every redirect with curl before going live.

2. Canonical tags pointing the wrong direction

If post-migration your pages have rel="canonical" pointing back to the OLD domain, Google ignores the new ones. I have actual scar tissue on this — a script that ran the wrong direction once almost flipped 200k pages. Verify direction with curl, every time.

Fix: audit canonical tags on every page before AND after migration. They should all point to the live, post-migration URL.

3. Sitemap not updated

Old sitemaps tell Google about pages that don't exist anymore. New pages don't get crawled because they're not in any sitemap. Both kill ranking velocity for weeks.

Fix: regenerate sitemap.xml at cutover, ping GSC, decommission old sitemaps. Add a sitemap-recent.xml for the migration deltas so they get crawled fast.

4. Schema / structured data lost in template change

Most consolidations rebuild templates. If your old templates had Article, LocalBusiness, RealEstateListing, BreadcrumbList schema and the new one doesn't — you lose rich snippets in SERPs, which means lower CTR even when rankings hold.

Fix: schema inventory on the old site BEFORE rebuild, then verify schema parity (or upgrade) on the new template.

5. Internal linking flattened

Old site had 8 internal links per page. New consolidated template has 2. Authority transfer collapses, page rank redistributes, traffic drops on every page that depended on internal links to rank.

Fix: document the internal-link graph of the old site, build the equivalent into new templates (related posts, hub pages, breadcrumbs).

The right order of operations

1. Inventory everything (old)Crawl every URL, every canonical, every sitemap, every schema block. Spreadsheet. No exceptions.

2. Map old → new (every URL)Even pages that go away get a redirect to the closest equivalent. Nothing 404s.

3. Build new templates with schema parity (or upgrade)If the old site had RealEstateListing schema, the new one needs it too — or richer.

4. Stage everything in dev / preview environmentTest redirects, canonicals, schema, internal links BEFORE pointing DNS.

5. Cutover during a low-traffic windowTuesday 2am PT works for most US real estate sites. Have rollback ready.

6. Monitor Google Search Console daily for 30 daysCrawl errors, coverage drops, ranking shifts. Catch + fix in week 1, not month 3.

Receipts: I just did this on a 200k+ page site this weekend

Schema mega-upgrade across 176k+ pages, twitter card upgrade across 206k pages, sitemap consolidation, 0 ranking loss. The infrastructure scripts are in the repo. The CDN cache invalidation pipeline (CloudFront) is built. The whole site is on S3 + CloudFront, deployed via a custom fastship.sh pipeline that does parallel uploads + smart invalidation in seconds.

I'm not learning this on your project — I'm bringing it to your project.

A note from PJ

Todd — I saw your post asking for someone "great." Most of the people who'll DM you will be agencies pitching $25k+ engagements with timelines in months. That's how the industry handles this stuff. It doesn't have to take that long or cost that much.

If LoKation wants to do this right and fast: text me. I'll quote you in 1-2 messages, no discovery call, and I'll show you the actual migration plan before you commit to anything. If we're not a fit, no harm done — you have the playbook above either way.

$800–$2k is realistic for a small consolidation (2-4 sites merging). $5-10k for something bigger with multiple subdomains. No retainer.

This page itself is a SideGuy Shareable — built for you in real time after I saw your post. That's also the kind of thing I do.

💬 Text PJ — let's scope it 858-461-8054 · same-day quote, no call required

"Todd at LoKation. Saw your migration page. Here's the setup..."