Before you let them touch your redirect map. Print, take to the meeting, watch faces.
From kunaldabi.com/301-vs-302-redirections/ · Kunal Singh Dabi · KD Digital · WhatsApp +91 96366 50036
Show me a redirect map you wrote for a previous client — old URL, new URL, type, reason. One row per move.
Why: If they can't produce one, they've never done a real migration. They're learning on your site. Walk away.
When would you use a 302 instead of a 301?
Right answer: "Almost never. Only for A/B tests, geo-tests, seasonal landing pages that will revert." Wrong answer: "When we're not sure yet" or "for newer pages." Either of those = they've cost previous clients ranking equity.
How do you handle redirect chains — e.g., /a/ → /b/ → /c/ — when adding a new redirect?
Right answer: "I rewrite /a/ to point AT /c/ directly so it stays one hop." Wrong answer: Silence, or "Google handles it." If they don't actively kill chains, your equity bleeds out across hops. This is the single best filter question.
Walk me through your verification process AFTER the redirects deploy.
Right answer: Mentions curl/Screaming Frog/specific scripts, hits every old URL, captures status code + final destination + hop count, exports a report. Wrong answer: "We spot-check a few." Spot-checking misses the 90% you didn't sample.
How will you handle the URLs that have backlinks but no current traffic — keep them, drop them, or redirect them?
Right answer: Identify the highest-DR backlinks and redirect those URLs to the most semantically related new page (not the homepage). Wrong answer: "Redirect everything to homepage." That's a 404-equivalent in Google's eyes — equity dies.
What's your rollback plan if traffic drops 30% in week 1?
Right answer: "Lower DNS TTL 24h before launch, snapshot the old .htaccess, have the old codebase deployable in <5 min, monitor GSC daily." Wrong answer: "We don't expect that to happen." That's confidence-as-a-substitute-for-process. Run.
How do you preserve canonical signals (rel=canonical, hreflang) during the move?
Right answer: Each new URL's canonical points at itself; hreflang chains are rebuilt on the new URL set. Wrong answer: Confusion about canonical vs redirect — those are different signals and confusion = mess.
Will you update internal links across the site to point at the NEW URLs, or rely on the redirects to handle it?
Right answer: "Update every internal link to the new URL — relying on the redirect creates an extra hop on every internal click and signals to Google that we forgot." Wrong answer: "Redirects handle it." Lazy. They don't.
Show me a 30-day post-migration report from a previous project — what dipped, what recovered, what didn't.
Right answer: They have one. Numbers honest. Recovery curve tracked weekly. Wrong answer: "All our migrations went smoothly." Nobody's all gone smoothly. They're either lying or they didn't measure — both bad.
Who specifically will write the redirect rules and run the post-deploy verification — name + role?
Right answer: Specific senior person named with their handover/escalation contact. Wrong answer: "Our team handles it." Translation: a junior with no review will write the file you depend on for 18 months of ranking. Insist on the named owner.