Andre GuelmannA relaunch with millions of new URLs - back above baseline within 7 months.
I guided a major U.S. retailer through a full site redesign and a massive category and product expansion - millions of new URLs, with some legacy areas retired. We expected a short-term dip; the site hit a controlled trough right after launch, then recovered and surpassed pre-launch levels within 7 months. Monthly organic traffic moved from a ~25M baseline to ~38M, and #1-3 rankings finished above where they started.
A high-risk cutover at enormous scale - right before the holidays.
- Scale & change amplitude: tens of millions of ranking keywords; >600k → >2M crawlable pages across the transition.
- Mixed-intent inventory: retire obsolete legacy sections without creating index bloat or soft-404s.
- Facets & duplication: filters, sorting, and pagination threatening to explode the URL count and dilute signals.
- Holiday seasonality: a December launch made seasonal spikes hard to separate from migration effects.
- Crawl budget & discoverability: millions of new URLs needing to be found, linked, and in sitemaps from day one.
Redirect governance, IA, facet control, schema, sitemaps - and a tight post-launch ops loop.
Redirect & retirement governance
Mapped legacy → new at scale with a “keep / combine / retire” matrix, prevented soft-404 chains and irrelevant hops, and used 410s for dead ends to protect crawl budget.
Information architecture & internal linking
Re-framed category → subcategory → product flows with hub → cluster linking, related rails, breadcrumbs, and consistent canonicals.
Faceted navigation controls
Robots/canonicals for non-value facets, a pre-approved index-worthy facet list, and normalized parameters and pagination to cut duplication.
Schema & product-feed hygiene
Rolled out Product, Offer, AggregateRating, and BreadcrumbList, aligning feed attributes to markup to stabilize rich results.
XML sitemaps & discovery
Segmented, freshness-ordered index sitemaps (categories / subcats / in-stock products / seasonal), a fast re-submit cadence, and server-log monitoring.
Monitoring & rollback playbook
A daily post-launch dashboard (traffic, indexation, bucketed rankings, 404/soft-404, 5xx) plus change-freeze windows and a clear rollback path.
A risky cutover turned into a controlled recovery - and growth past where it started.
≈50% above the pre-launch baseline as new categories indexed
new breadth without uncontrolled facet bloat
#1-3 rankings finished above pre-launch - quality recovery, not just breadth
The trajectory, charted.
Total keywords contracted through the cutover, then recovered above the pre-launch reference.
New category and product breadth - without uncontrolled facet bloat.
The decisions that made the difference.
- Intent-driven deprecation: pruned or 410’d legacy URLs that no longer served demand, preventing bloat and preserving crawl budget for new lines.
- Signals concentrated where they mattered: IA, internal links, and schema focused authority on category hubs and in-stock products.
- Fast discoverability: segmented sitemaps and log-based monitoring cut inclusion latency for new content.
- Tight post-launch ops: dashboards, freeze windows, and a clear rollback plan turned a risky cutover into a controlled recovery.
I have been jealous of Andre since we started to work together. As time went by, I realized that he was much more… he literally knew everything about everything… On-page, off-page, strategy, user intent, algorithm updates, content best practices, navigation and website structure, structured data best practices, canonical URL optimization, site speed, AMP, multilingual websites… And the worst thing, I couldn't share my frustration with anyone, because everybody loves Andre.
Andre is very well versed in multiple aspects of online marketing, which turned him into a key player for projects that go beyond SEO and content marketing. Andre excels at taking projects from beginning to end and assuring a high level of execution. I'm confident he'll be a great asset to whichever company or organization he will join.
Have a project like this?
Tell me what you're planning - a migration, a pivot, a growth push. I'll show you the risks and how I'd protect the downside.
I read and reply to every message personally - usually within 1-2 business days.