Case study: securing an SEO migration in two weeks after a rebranding

Nils Talibart portrait Nils Talibart has been an independent SEO consultant since 2012. He supports major accounts (La Poste, Brico Dépôt, SeLoger) and SMEs in optimizing their visibility.

At the end of 2025, L'Annuaire Vert, the leading information site for organic sector players, became Best of Bio. A rebranding that, from a technical point of view, took place in just two weeks, with a site migration from the domain annuairevert.com to best-of-bio.fr.

The use of redirection.io allowed for considerable time savings in managing redirections (recovery and sorting of existing redirections, adding redirections related to the rebranding), while facilitating post-migration monitoring through log analysis.

The result was a seamless migration for the client, and maintained SEO visibility - which has even been increasing since.

Best of Bio site homepage

Context

Who is L'Annuaire Vert?

Created in 1983, L'Annuaire Vert is considered the pioneer and historical reference for the organic sector in France. This specialized directory, distributed for over 40 years in paper format, has since appeared on the internet, with a site that lists all organic professionals (stores, companies, distributors, wholesalers, etc.) and their products.

Why a rebranding?

At the end of 2025, L'Annuaire Vert became Best of Bio, "the new media ecosystem for organic decision-makers". A rebranding that gave the brand a fresh look and allowed it to enter "a new era: more modern, more readable, more alive".

This rebranding resulted in:

  • A name change (from L'Annuaire Vert to Best of Bio)
  • A domain name change (from annuairevert.com to best-of-bio.fr)
  • A change in visual identity

It was also accompanied by the name change of certain site sections, and the deletion of other sections: "BioNews", for example, became "Le Mag", which absorbed the entire old "Magazine" part (41% of organic traffic).

A tight timing

The rebranded version of the site under the name Best of Bio had to be online for Natexpo, the international organic products trade fair, on November 30, 2025. An announcement made by the client... just over two weeks before!

Challenges

In a tight timeframe, in collaboration with the web agency Coccinet, it was necessary:

  • To manage the redirection from annuairevert.com to best-of-bio.fr
  • To manage the recovery of existing redirections in place in the .htaccess file... while cleaning up these redirections
    • The previous migration (and complete redesign) of the site in 2022 had been poorly managed, with mass redirections to irrelevant URLs
    • 24% of the redirections in place led to a 404 final URL
  • To implement new redirections as part of the section name changes and the deletion of certain sections
  • As an SEO consultant, to work autonomously on redirection management, so as not to add an extra workload to the technical provider with this subject

In this case, there was no challenge of additional organic traffic, since the content remained globally identical - except for a few deletions / section changes. It was primarily about maintaining existing traffic and SEO visibility during the migration.

Actions performed

To handle all these issues in such a short time, and facilitate post-migration monitoring through real-time log analysis, we chose to implement redirection.io.

1. Installation of redirection.io

First step: install redirection.io. Thanks to multi-domain management, it was possible to simultaneously manage both domain names (annuairevert.com and best-of-bio.fr) and their associated rules within a single project on redirection.io.

The redirection.io agent was installed on the unique Virtualhost - which thus responds to both domain names thanks to the server alias. The agent then intercepts all incoming traffic, and the configured rules do the sorting.

Only point to note: traffic logs are by default mixed between the two domains on the redirection.io log analysis tool, but it is then enough to use the filters of the interface to isolate each domain.

2. Export, analysis and sorting of existing redirections

7,400 redirections were already in place on annuairevert.com, via the .htaccess file. After an export by Coccinet of these existing rules, I performed a major cleanup, since 24% of the redirections in place redirected to a 404 error final URL.

All these rules were largely from a redesign carried out in 2022, with a poorly managed redirection plan, resulting in mass redirections to irrelevant URLs (no semantic proximity between the source URL and the target URL).

I thus sorted through these existing rules to correct and rationalize them. Finally, just under 2,400 rules were kept.

3. Adding rebranding-related rules

In addition to recovering existing rules, I defined the rules related to:

  • The migration from one domain to another
  • The deletion and name change of certain sections

redirections from an old domain to another

4. Import of all rules on redirection.io

I imported all the rules independently (existing rules after analysis and sorting + rules related to rebranding) on redirection.io, using the CSV import feature.

display of the import result in redirection.io

redirection.io allows to define priorities in rule execution. This allows global rules (related to domain migration) and more specific rules (related to certain URLs, regardless of the domain) to coexist.

Practical feature: the import tool checks the consistency of the imported rules, which allowed me to notice duplicates among the added redirections.

Rule verification

A CSV file then details the errors encountered.

Display of a CSV with errors

5. Testing and deployment to production

After an acceptance phase, all redirection rules were deployed to production in one click as soon as the rebranding launch was effective. In a few seconds, the redirections were thus operational.

Thanks to redirection.io, we were also able to easily validate the Google Search Console property of the best-of-bio.fr site in advance. There is a ready-made recipe for this.

6. Post-migration monitoring

From then on, the real-time log analysis feature took over. It allowed for live monitoring of the migration launch, and specifically checking:

  • Correct processing of 301 redirections by search engine crawlers - starting with Googlebot
  • 404 errors that were appearing, to ensure they were legitimate or correct them otherwise
  • The absence of other error response codes

View of post-migration log monitoring

Results

Before moving on to the concrete results, with visibility curves, it must first be emphasized that using redirection.io saved a considerable amount of time in this migration project - with, let's remember, a very tight timing (two weeks).

As an SEO consultant, I didn't have to go back and forth (emails, tickets, etc.) with the web agency to ask them to implement redirections, add them, or correct them if necessary. I was able to work independently on redirection.io.

For the technical provider (the Coccinet web agency), it is a time saver. Once redirection.io was in place, they didn't have to worry about redirection management. Even though we have already collaborated on several other projects, from experience, implementing a redirection plan can often require multiple exchanges and back-and-forth:

  • Initial redirection plan implementation
  • Testing and adjustments after the acceptance phase
  • New corrections after log analysis
  • Etc.

All this time was saved by using redirection.io.

And concretely, then? Just over four months after the migration, the visibility of best-of-bio.fr in Google search results is now higher than that of annuairevert.com - and still growing (Haloscan data).

Haloscan migration data

Organic traffic has gradually shifted from annuairevert.com to best-of-bio.fr. The migration did not result in a loss of visibility - on the contrary, even. It now remains to continue the optimization work carried out on the site... but that's another story.