Relaunch recovery
Relaunch done, rankings gone. Now recover what can be saved.
The new site is live, prettier than before, and since launch the enquiries are gone, traffic halved, rankings slipped. That is not bad luck, it is a pattern with a clear cause: missing redirects, deleted content, removed signals. Recovery starts with an honest diagnosis, not a promise. We map the damage, restore the redirects and bring back what is salvageable.
How to spot it
Three symptoms, one diagnosis.
If one of these appears after a relaunch, almost always the same mechanism is to blame. The good news: it is diagnosable and usually repairable.
Traffic collapsed
In the first month after launch, 30 to 60 percent less organic traffic. Pages that ranked reliably are suddenly nowhere to be found. Usual cause: missing or wrong redirects.
Pages out of the index
Old URLs return 404, the new ones index slowly or not at all. Backlinks point into the void. Authority built over years runs into a dead address.
Rankings slipped
Money queries that sat on page 1 dropped to page 3 to 8. Often because ranking content was trimmed in the redesign, or schema and internal links were silently removed.
The five silent risks in detail, and why they are invisible after launch
How the recovery runs
Four steps, diagnosis first.
1 · Recovery audit
Fixed-price diagnosis: which URLs are dead, which ranked before, where redirects are missing, which content and signals were removed. Cross-checked with Search Console data and, where available, old crawls. Result: a prioritised damage list with a salvageability estimate per item.
2 · Restore the redirect map
Every old ranking or linked URL gets its 301 to the right new target, retroactively. No mass redirect to the homepage, Google treats that as a soft 404. 1:1 where possible, cleanly consolidated where needed.
3 · Reconstruct content & signals
Ranking long-tail wording that vanished in the redesign is rebuilt. Schema, breadcrumbs and internal linking are restored or improved in the new template. Accidental noindex locks left over from staging are removed.
4 · Re-indexation & monitoring
Sitemap resubmitted, indexation triggered, crawl and ranking progress watched for the first weeks. The recovery becomes visible rather than guessed, and anomalies are fixed early.
Real example
Exactly this case, in practice.
A Munich electrical business inherited a site that a previous agency had migrated without redirects. A page that previously held a top position for a meter-cabinet query had completely dropped out of the index. We rebuilt the redirect logic, restored the crawlable structure and started the recovery, alongside fixing six critical compliance gaps left by the same agency.
Rucker Elektro: compliance recovered, visibility nearly tripled in 7 weeks
- Inherited damage: rankings gone, no redirects, GDPR risk, contact form pointing at the previous agency.
- Recovery sprint: 7 weeks. Compliance rebuilt, redirect map restored, content restructured by search intent.
- Result: visibility nearly tripled, top 10 for relevant Munich queries, indexation restored.
- Live test on the day the new wallbox-subsidy law took effect: article indexed within 24 hours, four times the daily average clicks.
When this is NOT the right path
Two honest boundaries.
- Your relaunch is still ahead of you. Then prevention is the better and cheaper path: website relaunch without losing rankings, before the damage occurs.
- The old site had no organic visibility anyway. Then there is nothing to recover, and a clean rebuild makes more sense than a recovery.
FAQ
Common questions.
In most cases a large part of them, yes, provided you act quickly. If the old URLs have not been dead for too long and the content is reconstructable, redirects can be restored and signals rebuilt. Honestly: pages that have already fully dropped out of the index and whose content was deleted are not guaranteed to return 100 percent. The earlier the recovery starts, the more can be saved.
The relaunch service is prevention: we guide a planned move before it happens, so nothing breaks. Recovery is damage control: the relaunch has already happened, traffic is gone, and we repair retroactively. Both follow the same mechanics, but recovery begins with a diagnosis of the damage done rather than with migration planning.
Once redirects are in place and Google re-crawls the site, things often turn upward within days to a few weeks. Full recovery follows re-indexation and the re-evaluation of signals and typically takes some weeks. We set up crawl and indexation monitoring so the progress is visible rather than guessed.
The entry is always a fixed-price recovery audit: we map what is broken, how big the damage is and what is salvageable. Only then is the scope of the actual repair clear, because depending on the damage it ranges from a few days to a partial rebuild. No flat price for a problem we have not seen yet.
That is the most common case. We do not need access to the previous agency, only to the domain, the hosting and Search Console. We document the inherited defects factually, without blame, and rebuild what we can. For the Munich business Rucker Elektro, that was exactly the starting point.
Who leads the recovery
Patrick Sosath, founder & strategist.
Trained IT business specialist, Management & Technology degree at OTH Regensburg. Background in B2B software and IT systems.
A recovery is detective work at the seam between SEO and engineering. Patrick runs both sides, so redirect analysis and technical repair are decided by the same person. That seam, the handover between SEO and development, is exactly where the damage is created that we undo.
Lost traffic after a relaunch?
Send us the URL. We will tell you what broke and what can be saved.
The entry is a fixed-price recovery audit with a prioritised damage list. Honest framing included, even if the answer is that a rebuild makes more sense.
Get in touch
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