A Redirect Map for Defense Firms Rebuilding Their Website

A defense firm usually rebuilds its website for good reasons. The old design looks dated, the pages load slowly on a phone, or the firm has added practice areas that never fit the original menu. The trouble starts on launch day, when years of ranking history sit on old addresses that no longer exist.

If your DUI page lived at one URL for six years and now lives at another, Google has to be told. The tool for that is a redirect map, a plain spreadsheet that pairs every old address with its new home. Firms that skip it often watch their charge pages slide for months while nobody can explain why.

Why old URLs still matter after a redesign

Every page that has been live for a while has collected signals. Other sites link to it. Google has crawled it many times and learned what it covers. Past clients may have bookmarked it, and directory listings may point to it. When that address starts returning a 404 error, those signals have nowhere to go.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. It tells browsers and search engines that the page has moved for good and where to find it now. Google's public guidance on site moves recommends permanent redirects from old URLs to the matching new ones, and Google's John Mueller has said publicly that redirects should stay in place for at least a year. Many firms simply leave them up for good, which costs nothing.

Building the map before anything launches

Start with a full list of the old site's URLs. Pull them from three places, because no single source catches everything:

• A crawl of the live site with a tool such as Screaming Frog
• The Pages report in Google Search Console, which shows what Google has indexed
• Your analytics, filtered to landing pages that received search visits in the past year

Paste them into one column, remove duplicates and add a second column for the new URL. Then go line by line. The DUI page maps to the new DUI page. The old "drug possession" page maps to the new drug charges page if that is where the content went. A blog post about expungement maps to the rewritten version of that post.

Matching pages instead of dumping them

The most common mistake is sending every old URL to the homepage. It feels tidy, but Google tends to treat a redirect to an unrelated page much like a missing page. A person who clicked an old link about assault charges also lands somewhere that has nothing to do with their problem.

Each old page should point to the closest match on the new site. If a charge page was merged into a broader one, redirect it to that broader page. If a page was removed and nothing on the new site covers the topic, it may be better to let it return a 404 or 410 than to force a weak match. Make those calls deliberately and write the reason next to the row.

Avoiding chains and loops

Firms that have redesigned twice often have redirects stacked on redirects. Page A points to page B, which points to page C. Each hop slows the visitor down and gives crawlers another chance to give up. When you build the new map, check whether any old URL is already a redirect, and point it straight to the final destination.

Loops are worse. If page B redirects to C and C redirects back to B, the browser shows an error and the page is effectively gone. A crawl of the staging site with redirects turned on will catch both problems before real visitors do. For more on how pages on a firm's own site should point to each other once the move is finished, see this guide to internal linking between charge pages.

The first two weeks after launch

Launch day is when the map gets tested. Run these checks in order:

1. Crawl the old URL list against the live site and confirm each one returns a 301 to the intended page
2. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console
3. Watch the Pages report for a rise in "Not found (404)" entries and fix any that should have been mapped
4. Check that the new pages carry the right canonical tags and are not blocked by a leftover noindex tag from staging
5. Compare search traffic to your main charge pages week over week

Some movement in rankings is normal while Google recrawls. A steady decline on one page usually points to a specific fault, such as a missing redirect, a noindex tag or content that was cut during the redesign. Fix the fault and request indexing for that page.

Who should own the map

Web designers are often focused on how the new site looks. The person who knows which pages bring in calls is usually someone at the firm. Put that person in charge of signing off on the map. They do not need to write code. They need to read the spreadsheet and say, "Yes, our old felony DUI page goes here."

Keep the finished map after launch. When someone asks a year later why an old link still works, the answer is in that file. The technical SEO guides for law firms cover related checks on crawling, indexing and site speed in more detail.

Questions defense firms ask about redirects

Do we need redirects if the domain is staying the same?

Yes, if any page addresses change. A new site on the same domain often uses a different URL structure, and every changed address needs its own redirect.

Can our web host handle redirects for us?

Most hosts and content systems can set them up, either in a plugin, a server file or a dashboard. The host can install them, but someone still has to decide where each old page should go.

How long before rankings settle?

It varies with the size of the site and how often Google crawls it. Smaller firm sites often settle within a few weeks if the map was done well. Track your main charge pages rather than the site as a whole.

SBD Marketing works only with criminal defense law firms, one firm per city, and helps them with website design, SEO for the charges they defend, visibility in AI search tools and SEO audits, including planning redirects before a site rebuild goes live.