ghalibashrafi.comMigrating a 24-page site carrying 50,541 impressions

The problem they came with

We were about to replace a site that carried 50,541 search impressions across 24 ranking pages. That is not a redesign, it is a migration, and migrations are where sites quietly lose the rankings they spent years earning.

The audit turned up something worse than a technical fault. Sitewide click-through was 0.13% — the pages ranked and nobody clicked them. The reason was identical on all of them: not one of the 24 had a meta description. Google had been auto-generating every snippet in the search results for a year.

What we did

1. 01

   Read every page before touching anything

   All 24 ranking URLs fetched and recorded — titles, headings, opening copy, schema, word counts. You cannot preserve what you have not read, and rebuilding from memory is how content silently disappears in a migration.

2. 02

   Write the 24 missing descriptions

   Every page on the new site ships a hand-written, length-checked description. This was the actual bottleneck, and it cost less than a day.

3. 03

   Build the redirect map before launch, not after

   All 24 orphaned URLs mapped. Eighteen had no obvious destination in the new structure and are marked interim in the config until their real child page exists.

4. 04

   Point the London URLs at a London page

   The two London URLs carried 35,001 impressions — 68% of the entire site’s visibility. Redirecting those to a generic services hub would be read as a soft 404, so both now land on a page about London.

5. 05

   Block the injected spam paths

   Search Console showed 60+ indexed URLs under paths that were never pages here. robots.txt alone does not remove them, so the file documents the four-step fix and it has to happen before launch.

What happened

Nothing on this page is a projection: the site is live and the figures come from a Search Console property we own and can open in front of you. The point of publishing it is that the audit found a mistake on all 24 pages, and that mistake was ours. An agency that will show you its own worst finding is easier to check than one that will only show you its best client.

Our own site — figures from our Search Console, 12 months to 11 Aug 2026

What was hard

The redirect map is the part nobody enjoys. Twenty-four URLs is small, but eighteen had no obvious destination in the new structure, and pointing those at a generic hub would be read as a soft 404 — so several are still marked interim in the config until their real child page exists.

Check this yourself

Search site:ghalibashrafi.com and read the snippets on the old pages. Google wrote every one of them, because there were no descriptions to use.

We would rather you tested one claim on this page than took all of them on trust. If something here does not hold up, tell us and it comes down — that is the arrangement, and the rest of the checklist is published too.