Technical eligibility, control 20 of 20
T-20 Protect migrations and destructive URL changes
P0Hard gateNeeds your evidence
Every destructive URL change needs an approved inventory, destination rationale, baseline, rollback plan and post-release monitoring.
- Priority
- Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
- Hard gate
- Yes. A FAIL stops publication, whatever the score.
- Change class
- APPROVAL_REQUIRED: Required exact authority must be valid before the consequential action.
- Quality bucket
- Not scored: hard gate only
Evidence to review
- Approved mapping, staging replay, redirect graph, traffic baseline and post-deploy route tests.
How to implement
- Map valuable old URLs to genuinely relevant successors or intentional removals.
- Check variants, assets, canonicals, internal links, analytics and hreflang.
- Do not redirect every retired page to the homepage.
- Preserve necessary redirects and confirm all required property changes with the platform's current guidance.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Needs your evidence. No automated check covers this control, so it stays UNKNOWN until evidence is supplied.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.