What We Found
Doing Your
SEO Audit

Migration 1 (pre-December 2025): The site moved from a generic practice area structure (/criminal-defense/, /family-law/, /civil-litigation/) to location-prefixed pages (/warrenton-criminal-defense-lawyer/). No 301 redirects were added. Google had already indexed the old URLs, so it kept crawling them and found 404s — creating the 50-URL baseline in the December data.

Migration 2 (January 23, 2026): Blog posts moved from date-based URLs (/blog/2023/09/slander-in-virginia/) to clean slugs (/blog/slander-in-virginia/). Again, no redirects. On January 23 alone, the 404 count jumped by 55 in a single day. It's been climbing ever since as Google continues re-crawling old indexed blog URLs.

All 96 old blog URLs follow the same pattern: /blog/YYYY/MM/slug/ → /blog/slug/. One regex rule handles all of them. A second regex handles 13 double-slash variants (/blog//YYYY/MM/slug/). These two rules resolve 109 of your 239 404s instantly.

# Rule 1: /blog/2023/09/slug/ → /blog/slug/  (handles 96 URLs)
RewriteRule ^blog/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/(.+)$ /blog/$1 [R=301,L]

# Rule 2: /blog//2023/09/slug/ → /blog/slug/  (handles 13 URLs)
RewriteRule ^blog//[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/(.+)$ /blog/$1 [R=301,L]

Rule 1
  Source (regex ON): /blog/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/(.+)
  Target:            /blog/$1
  Type:              301 Permanent

Rule 2
  Source (regex ON): /blog//[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/(.+)
  Target:            /blog/$1
  Type:              301 Permanent

The old site used generic practice area URLs. Every one needs an individual redirect to its current location-prefixed equivalent.

Old blog posts that were previously at the root level (now at /blog/), renamed service pages, and attorney profiles that moved from /attorney/ to /about-us/.

These don't need redirects — some need blocking, some need GSC parameter settings, some should just be left to 404.