ObservationsIndexation and crawling
A store moved platforms and sent every old blog article to its homepage
In short
Years of informational rankings were being thrown away because old article addresses all pointed to the homepage.
What I did
I reviewed an online store that had moved to Shopify Plus. Its old blog was gone. Old article addresses that Google still knew about now opened the store homepage. There was no new blog to replace them.
Where
An online store, reviewed in August 2026
What changed
Nothing yet; this came from a review. My recommendation was to rebuild the key articles on the new platform and redirect each old address to its own new article.
What you should do
Before any platform move, export every page address that gets traffic. After the move, open each old address. Each one should land on a matching page, not the homepage.
How long it took
One to several days, depending on the number of articles
A soft 404 is when a page that no longer exists does not return an error, but shows something else instead, often the homepage. Google treats these as missing pages.
Why it matters
For products people research before buying, like home goods or equipment, the blog answers the “how do I choose” questions. Those articles bring in buyers early.
Redirecting all of them to the homepage looks tidy, but Google sees through it. The articles drop out of search, and the links pointing at them stop helping the store.
How to check your own site
- Search Google for site:yourdomain.com/blog to see which old addresses Google still has.
- Open a few. If they land on the homepage, they need their own redirects.
At a glance
Allold article addresses opened the homepage
0replacement articles on the new platform
What this changed in how I work
On every migration review, the first thing I test is where the old blog addresses go.
End of Lab entry No. 025
- 18 old post addresses lost all their impressions before anyone redirected them, but the articles came back on new addresses6 Nov 2026
- Four of my new September articles had no impressions two to four weeks after publishing29 Oct 2026
- Search Console showed web addresses that never existed, at position 127 Oct 2026
- My new article was not indexed for two weeks. Schema did not fix it. Links and one indexing request did.It worked26 Oct 2026