SEO contract
An SEO contract is the fixed list of search facts a migration must keep — URLs, titles, canonicals, schema, sitemap and robots — checked as a pass-or-fail gate.
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What an SEO contract is
An SEO contract is the written list of search facts that must survive a migration: every URL with its destination decision, every title and description, the canonical rule, hreflang pairs, structured data, the sitemap and robots.txt. It is agreed before work starts and checked after the rebuild.
What it does and does not control
The contract controls what a migration is allowed to break. A page whose title disappears, whose canonical points elsewhere or whose URL returns a 404 is a failure of the contract, not a detail to fix later. The contract does not control rankings, traffic or how fast a search engine recrawls the new site. It makes losses visible and refuses to deploy when they happen.
How it is checked
Each rule is a pass-or-fail gate over the rebuilt site: crawler output compared with the baseline, titles and headings compared page by page, canonicals resolved, redirects followed. A failing gate stops the change set. The report lists every rule with its evidence, so the owner can see what passed rather than trust a summary.
Where it fits in the product
The migration pipeline runs this gate before cutover and keeps the report with the change set. The contract is the reason a migration can be described as reversible: the earlier state is recorded, and the same rules compare the next state against it.
Related terms
- Redirect map
A redirect map records the decision for every legacy URL: keep the path, redirect it, remove it or flag it for review. It is tested before cutover.
- Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the address a page declares as its true location with rel=canonical. It consolidates duplicates and must match the sitemap and hreflang.
- Change set
A change set is one proposed website change, written in a sandbox, previewed, run through the gates, approved or rejected, then deployed and measured.
Not sure where the term fits? Run a free audit of the site you already have and read the findings before deciding what to change.
All terms