The short answer
It can. On a South Florida roofing site we run, 19 city pages moved to new addresses with permanent redirects on 12 Aug 2026. Comparing the 28 days before the move with 15 Sep to 12 Oct, those pages lost 74% of their Google impressions while the rest of the site lost 12%. Nine weeks on, they have not come back.
- -74%
- city page impressions, old and new addresses together, 28 days before the move vs 15 Sep to 12 Oct 2026
- -12%
- every other page on the site, same compare
- -42%
- city page impressions, first 28 days after the move vs the 28 days before
- 36%
- the new addresses' best week, as a share of the city pages' average week before the move
Google Search Console for the site, pulled 15 Oct 2026. We have left the site unnamed.
What changed on the site, and when
The site belongs to a roofing contractor in South Florida. Its city pages had short addresses at the top level of the site, one per city, and two changes landed on them a day apart.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 11 Aug 2026 | 17 city pages rewritten with local detail, plus a build check that fails when two city pages share too much text |
| 12 Aug 2026 | 19 city pages moved into a services folder two levels deeper, with the city kept in the new address. Each old address answered with a permanent redirect, and the sitemap and the internal links switched to the new addresses in the same change |
Two changes in two days means the loss cannot be split cleanly between them. The weekly numbers below point at the move.
What happened to the city pages in Google
| Week starting | All city pages | Old addresses | New addresses | Rest of the site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Jul | 120% | 120% | 0% | 101% |
| 20 Jul | 124% | 124% | 0% | 121% |
| 27 Jul | 86% | 86% | 0% | 105% |
| 3 Aug | 69% | 69% | 0% | 72% |
| 10 Aug, the move | 74% | 73% | 1% | 82% |
| 17 Aug | 56% | 48% | 8% | 101% |
| 24 Aug | 55% | 25% | 30% | 112% |
| 31 Aug | 44% | 21% | 23% | 97% |
| 7 Sep | 39% | 8% | 31% | 98% |
| 14 Sep | 40% | 3% | 36% | 86% |
| 21 Sep | 25% | 3% | 23% | 85% |
| 28 Sep | 17% | 2% | 15% | 86% |
| 5 Oct | 18% | 2% | 16% | 89% |
Both groups slipped in the week of 3 August, before either change, so part of the drop was already under way. The rest of the site recovered to between 85% and 112% of its July level; the city pages kept falling. The old addresses faded out of Google over about five weeks, and the new addresses never carried more than 36% of what the old ones averaged.
Was it the move or the rewrite?
We cannot prove which, because both landed within a day. Two things point at the move. Google's site-move guide tells you to expect ranking fluctuation while it recrawls and reindexes moved pages (Google Search Central, updated 20 Aug 2026). And Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the new address should be the one it shows (Redirects and Google Search, updated 14 Apr 2026); a signal is weighed, and the old page's place does not copy across automatically. The new addresses started with no history of their own and, nine weeks later, had under a fifth of the old addresses' weekly visibility.
What we would change is the order: one change at a time, with four weeks between them, so the numbers can tell you what did what.
How to change URLs on a roofing site without losing what ranks
- Leave a page where it is if Google already shows it. A tidier folder structure is worth less than the visibility the old address has earned.
- If a page has to move, move it and change nothing else that month. Rewrite it later, once the new address has settled.
- Send each old address straight to its new one with a server-side permanent redirect, a 301 or a 308. Google lists both as permanent (Redirects and Google Search) and advises against chains of redirects (site-move guide).
- Switch your internal links and your sitemap to the new addresses the same day, as Google's site-move guide lays out.
- Keep the redirects for at least a year. Google's guide says "generally at least 1 year".
- Read old and new addresses together in Search Console for at least four weeks before the next change.
If many pages have to move, Google recommends moving all the URLs of a small or medium site at once, instead of one section at a time.
Questions roofers ask about this
Do 301 redirects keep my Google rankings?
They tell Google where the page went, and Google uses a permanent redirect as a signal that the new address should be the one it shows. On this site the redirected city pages held under a fifth of their weekly visibility nine weeks later, so plan for a loss when you move a page that ranks.
How long does Google take to process a URL change?
Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move. Here the old addresses had mostly dropped out of results within five weeks.
Is a 308 redirect worse than a 301 for SEO?
Google's redirect documentation lists 301 and 308 together as permanent redirects with the same meaning.
Did the move cost the roofer jobs?
The city pages were sending few clicks before the move, so the clicks lost were few. What the move cost was visibility in 19 cities, and that is what this note measures.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes. Updated 20 Aug 2026.
- Google Search Central, Redirects and Google Search. Updated 14 Apr 2026.
- Google Search Console for the site. Pulled 15 Oct 2026, site left unnamed.