Reclaiming lost pages or blog posts after a website migration or redesign.

Here’s a scenario I’ve encountered a few times in my career:

A business chose to migrate and/or redesign their website.

In the process, a lot of the original content from their website got removed, but they weren’t aware of that fact.

What’s usually worse is that that content drove considerable traffic and had SEO value because the topics were on the buyer’s journey. 🤦

Now, there’s nothing wrong with pruning your content during a site migration or redesign to remove less relevant pages or consolidate near-duplicate pages.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about pages being removed with no strategic guidance. (Probably a cost consideration.)

More than a few times, I’ve seen website owners reach out for SEO services and mention, “We redesigned our website last year and traffic hasn’t been the same.”

Upon looking at year-over-year metrics in Google Search Console, you can find obvious hints of removed pages.

Here’s the good news:

Even if it’s been a year or more, reclaiming those lost pages still has value to your SEO strategy.

At a minimum, you can recover some of the lost traffic from the pages.

Even better, some of those pages may have historical backlinks with authoritative signals or referral traffic potential that you can still forward.

Here’s how to recover lost pages step-by-step:

1. Create a list of all the pages that were removed.

You can look through the 404 pages report in GSC or an SEO tool of your choice.

I also find it’s helpful when prioritizing to set the GSC performance report to a YoY comparison from before and after the migration or redesign and find pages that now show 0 clicks.

Often, those pages won’t have 301 redirects applied because they were deleted without a strategy.

If they do have redirects, you’ll want to remove those when you recreate the pages (later step).

2. Use WayBack Machine to identify all of the pages with recoverable content.

Here’s a link to WayBack Machine.

If a webpage received meaningful traffic on the old site, whether it was a blog post or service page, it’ll likely have a record in WayBack Machine.

This tool makes it possible to view the original content of the page, prior to its deletion, so you can reclaim it for republishing.

*As a note: don’t just reclaim all lost pages by default. Choose those that have a business case because they are on your user’s buyer’s journey.

3. Put the content for each removed page in a rolling Google Doc for editorial review.

While you could just copy over a removed page’s content into your CMS and rebuild the page there, I find it’s better to create a rolling document for the content to be reviewed and refreshed first.

Oftentimes, deleted blog posts or other pages have outdated information that needs updating before relaunching the pages.

This is also an opportunity to make the pages more satisfying (helpful content) for your users, especially if they’re done in an old-school SEO manner.

4. Republish the old pages at the same URL or use 301 redirects.

When it comes time to republish your reclaimed pages, put them at the same URL as they were originally.

This ensures you can recapture as many signals of authority from the original post as possible, as well as recreate the user’s journey.

If your site structure has changed with the migration or redesign, add 301 redirects from the old page’s URL to its new destination to transfer signals or traffic.

I’d also recommend having the title tag and/or H1 be the same as before, assuming it was well optimized for users previously.

5. Set expectations that traffic may not be the same as before.

The Search landscape will be different now than when the posts were lost during the website redesign.

Chances are AIOs weren’t as prevalent, for example.

Also, Google’s ranking signals that rewarded the content in the past may have changed, and so may have the individual signals to the pages given the time lapse from when they were last live.

That said, if the pages have value to your users, primarily because they are quality content on their buyer’s journey, then there’s only upside to republishing them.

As I mentioned, I’ve encountered this situation multiple times, and usually the business owner wasn’t aware the content had been removed.

So the next time you work with a business that’s been through a redesign or migration, or you’ve done one yourself, confirm the status of all potentially valuable historical content assets and plan for reclamation.

In terms of quick SEO wins, this can be a good one.

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🤗

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