SEO after a pivot: what to keep, redirect and retire

Your product changed on a Tuesday. Google's index did not.

• The old URLs have been crawled for months or years, and they carry the links other sites gave them.
• The new URLs were published last week, have no links, and were discovered through a sitemap at best.
• Ranking on competitive queries takes months, and a new page starts that clock from zero.
• Deleting the old pages does not transfer anything. It removes the one asset the site had.

So the first weeks after a pivot look wrong in Search Console even when nothing is broken: impressions from a product you no longer sell, and silence from the one you do.

One site changed product completely. The old pages, a family of file-format explainers and a page comparing the product to a well known rival, were taken down. The new product shipped with its own pages: a home page, a pricing page, a handful of guides.

Months later the Performance report told a blunt story. Every impression in the fortnight came from the old product's pages, the file-format explainers and the alternatives page. The new pages had none. Not a penalty, not a technical fault: the old URLs had accumulated links and history, and the new ones had barely been discovered.

Three decisions would have changed that: redirect the alternatives page to the new comparison page, because the intent is the same and the links are real; keep the two file-format explainers that matched the new audience and rewrite them; retire the rest with a clean 410.

1. 1

   Export twelve months of pages from Search Console

   Impressions and clicks by page. Sort by impressions. This is the list of what Google still believes about your site.

2. 2

   Add the links

   The Links report gives your top linked pages, up to a sample of rows. A page with external links is not deleted casually.

3. 3

   Add the queries for the top pages

   Filter the Performance report page by page. The queries tell you whether the intent behind the traffic has any relation to the new product.

4. 4

   Mark the audience

   For each page, one word: same audience, adjacent audience, or gone. A file-format explainer read by developers may still fit a developer product.

5. 5

   Crawl the site as it is now

   Find the old pages still live, the ones already 404, and the internal links that still point at the old product.

The output is one table: URL, impressions, clicks, links, queries, audience. Five columns and one decision to make on each row.

The rule that decides most rows: redirect to a page that answers the same question, not to a page you wish they would read. A redirect to the home page is read as a soft 404 and earns nothing.

A pivot map is smaller than a migration map but harder to fill: half the old URLs have no equivalent. Write it as two columns and accept the blanks.

• Old URL, new URL, one row each, in the repository beside the code.
• A blank new URL means retire, and the row stays in the table so the decision is recorded.
• Apply the map at the edge or in the framework's redirects, not in a plugin nobody remembers.
• Test every row: request the old URL, expect one hop and a 200 at the end.
• Keep the old sitemap listed for a while so Google recrawls the old URLs and finds the map.

The pivot gave you a new category. Every product in a category has the same five pages waiting for it, and after a pivot you have none of them.

1. What the product is, on the home page, in the words the new audience searches.
2. The pricing page, which will rank for your own name plus pricing.
3. One comparison page against the rival people already know in the new category.
4. An alternatives page for that rival, which is the query with the clearest buying intent.
5. Two or three guides answering the jobs the product does, written against real results pages.

Publish those before writing anything else. They are the pages that convert the traffic the redirects will bring.

• Impressions split by old pages and new pages, week by week. You want the second line crossing the first.
• Clicks on the five new pages, not on the site as a whole.
• Indexed count in the Page indexing report, climbing as the retired URLs drop out.
• Referring domains to the new pages, which is the slow signal that decides the competitive queries.
• Signups by landing page, because impressions on a new product mean nothing until somebody arrives and stays.

Set the comparison to the same period a year before if you have it, and expect the total to fall before it rises. A pivot trades a stranger's traffic for your customer's.