Overview 

Following a large-scale CMS migration to WordPress, the platform experienced significant search visibility volatility across Google Search, Google News, and Google Discover. Despite strong editorial content and brand authority, post-migration issues introduced widespread indexation conflicts, crawl inefficiencies, and degraded discovery performance.

I was engaged to identify root causes, stabilize technical SEO performance, and restore scalable governance and crawl foundations supporting long-term visibility and editorial growth.

Key Challenges Identified

The audit revealed systemic post-migration failures, not content quality issues:

• Conflicting indexation signals
  Thousands of URLs marked noindex while simultaneously included in XML sitemaps
• Broken migration mappings
  ~4.9K legacy URLs returning 404s without redirect coverage, resulting in link equity loss
• Sitemap integrity breakdown
  170+ legacy and invalid sitemaps still referenced, including pre-launch files
• Crawl budget waste
  Excessive paginated URLs indexed; parameters incorrectly blocked via robots.txt
• Author & E-E-A-T degradation
  Broken author pages, duplicated bios, missing credentials, and poor internal linking
• Performance regression
  Core Web Vitals failures on mobile, impacting Discover and News eligibility

These issues compounded, leading to reduced crawl efficiency, ranking instability, and declining engagement.

Recovery Strategy 

The remediation plan prioritized stabilization before optimization, with phased recovery focused on crawl integrity, indexation accuracy, and governance.

1. Indexation & Crawl Signal Repair

• Rebuilt XML sitemap logic to include only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs
• Removed noindexed, redirected, and error URLs from sitemap files
• Eliminated outdated sitemap references contributing to crawl inefficiency

2. Redirect & Canonical Remediation

• Mapped and implemented 301 redirects for thousands of orphaned legacy URLs
• Standardized canonical behavior across articles, tags, pagination, and author pages
• Consolidated paginated URLs to strengthen canonical consistency

3. Robots.txt Rationalization

• Removed outdated disallow rules contributing to crawl inconsistencies
• Shifted indexation control to canonical and meta robots directives for more predictable behavior

4. Author & Authority Infrastructure Fixes

• Repaired broken author templates and paginated profile canonicals
• Standardized author bios, credentials, and authority signals
• Reduced cross-domain author duplication to strengthen attribution and trust

5. Performance & Discover Readiness

• Identified Core Web Vitals regressions affecting mobile visibility
• Prioritized remediation across images, scripts, caching, and third-party resources

Results & Impact

The recovery initiative delivered measurable improvements across crawl efficiency, indexation integrity, and platform governance:

• Restored crawl efficiency by eliminating conflicting sitemap and robots signals
• Recovered lost link equity through structured redirect remediation
• Improved indexation accuracy across articles, tags, and author pages
• Stabilized eligibility across Google News and Google Discover
• Established governance standards and technical controls to reduce future post-migration risk

Most importantly, the platform transitioned from reactive remediation to a stable, auditable technical foundation capable of supporting ongoing editorial growth.

Key Takeaway

Successful post-migration recovery depends on restoring crawl integrity, indexation accuracy, and governance alongside the platform itself. This engagement demonstrated how disciplined technical SEO remediation and operational controls can stabilize visibility and rebuild search engine trust at scale.