Changing addresses without losing readers: a thirty-day plan

A site changes its addresses once every few years: after a rename, after merging two sites, or while clearing up a decade of mess. Losing readers is not a necessary cost of that - it is the result of skipping one week of work.

Search engines do not punish a move. They punish silence: an address that answers with an error for a few weeks stops being useful to them and drops out of the index, taking with it the whole history of links pointing to it from elsewhere. That history is the most valuable thing a site has accumulated, and the one thing no amount of editorial work can rebuild.

What is actually lost in a move

Not the content and not the design - those travel without damage. What is lost is continuity: a bookmark a reader saved, a link in someone else's article from five years ago, an address in a video channel description, an entry in an industry directory. Each of them points at the old address, and each is worth exactly as much as the answer it finds there.