A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Case study · Fjellkyst Media
Travel magazine publisher · Oslo · Creative & Media
10 months · Technical SEO · Oslo, Norway
Avganger · Departures
Month Month 10 of 10
| Time | Flight | From | To | URLs | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boards month 3 | FK101 | nordlysreiser.noNordlys Reiser · NB | fjellkyst.no/nordlys | 18,400 of 18,400 URLs | DEPARTED |
| Boards month 4 | FK204 | fjordogfjell.noFjord & Fjell · NB | fjellkyst.no/fjell | 15,900 of 15,900 URLs | DEPARTED |
| Boards month 5 | FK317 | viddemagasin.noVidde Magasin · NB | fjellkyst.no/vidde | 14,200 of 14,200 URLs | DEPARTED |
| Boards month 6 | FK422 | arcticwayfarer.comArctic Wayfarer · EN | fjellkyst.no/en | 13,300 of 13,300 URLs | DEPARTED |
Arrivals. Combined sessions pass the four-domain baseline by 27%. Hreflang at 97% coverage.
Four legacy magazines, one destination. Use the controls or the slider to step through the migration.
01 · Pre-flight
Four legacy domains with 60,000 articles had to consolidate under one brand; previous mergers in the sector had lost 30-50% of traffic.
Fjellkyst Media publishes Norwegian and English travel journalism from one Oslo newsroom, but readers met it as four unrelated brands. Each domain had its own CMS, its own links and its own history of half-finished redirects. The brief was to land 61,800 articles on fjellkyst.no without the traffic cliff the sector had come to expect.
Log files showed crawlers stuck in ?sort=, ?page= and tag archives. New articles waited 11 days on average to be crawled.
Two earlier rebrands had left 7,300 URLs behind stacked 301s. Link equity leaked at every hop.
The English title translated Norwegian features, but Google treated each pair as two unrelated pages competing for the same queries.
Syndicated features ran on two or three titles at once and split their rankings for queries like "lofoten reiseguide".
Dates in some paths, IDs in others. Every pattern needed its own rewrite rule and test set.
11,600 referring domains linked to legacy homepages or sections and would only count if their redirects were mapped exactly.
02 · Flight plan
The engagement ran on our Signal plan for technical SEO: no title moved until the one before it had landed cleanly in the server logs. Four tactics carried the work.
One-to-one redirect map for all 61,800 articles, cut over one title at a time.
Staggered departures meant a problem with one title never touched the other three. Each wave shipped behind a 48-hour log watch.
nb-NO and en pairs linked in both directions, with x-default on hub pages.
Pairs came from the translation desk's own records, then were checked in the XML sitemaps so no template could drop them.
Parameter traps closed, tag archives consolidated, sitemaps split by section and kept fresh.
Googlebot's attention went back to articles that should rank, and new stories were crawled within hours rather than days.
Server logs parsed daily from the first audit to the last arrival.
Every redirect wave was checked against real crawler behaviour, not a desktop crawl, so stray 404s were fixed the same day.
03 · Schedule · 10 months
Four domains benchmarked. 90 days of server logs pulled from each CMS.
14.2M Googlebot hits parsed: 62% landed on tag pages, parameters and dead pagination.
61,800 one-to-one redirects mapped, 4,100 duplicate stories assigned a single canonical.
Nordlys Reiser goes first: smallest template set, strongest links. Redirects live in two waves.
Fjord & Fjell joins. The /fjell hub absorbs 312 overlapping hiking guides.
Vidde Magasin moves. Crawl waste below 35% as parameter traps are closed.
Arctic Wayfarer becomes /en. 9,400 translated pairs linked with hreflang.
Redirect chains flattened to one hop. Old XML sitemaps retired, new ones split by section.
Daily log checks: Googlebot spends 84% of its hits on indexable articles.
Combined sessions pass the four-domain baseline by 27%. Hreflang at 97% coverage.
04 · Arrivals
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Shaded bands mark each title’s boarding month.
62% → 11.8%
9,400 nb-NO / en pairs linked both ways; the remaining 3% have no live translation yet.
Before · month 0
lofoten reiseguide
After · month 10
lofoten reiseguide
| Query | Lang | Volume/mo | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lofoten reiseguide | NB | 6,600 | 7 | 2 ▲5 |
| nordlys når og hvor | NB | 8,100 | 9 | 2 ▲7 |
| best hikes norway | EN | 12,100 | 14 | 3 ▲11 |
| fjordcruise tips | NB | 2,400 | 5 | 1 ▲4 |
| tromsø northern lights guide | EN | 9,900 | 18 | 4 ▲14 |
| vandring jotunheimen | NB | 3,600 | 4 | 2 ▲2 |
| senja road trip | EN | 2,900 | 22 | 6 ▲16 |
| hyttetur vinter | NB | 4,400 | 11 | 3 ▲8 |
Merging domains, moving CMS or untangling hreflang? Signal is our technical seo plan, built around log files rather than guesswork.