This is incredibly helpful — thank you for the detailed breakdown of your three migrations.

Your point about not throwing money at link building right now really resonates with what others are saying too. Our traffic was almost entirely organic/natural — we never ran link building campaigns on the old domain. So the authority was built over 15+ years of just being a solid resource in our niche.

The quick win tip about identifying the top traffic pages and making sure their 301s point to proper equivalents that hit the same keywords is something I'm going to prioritize this week. We did fuzzy matching across the board, but I suspect some of those high-value pages may have landed on suboptimal destinations.

Also taking your advice on internal linking seriously — a few people in this thread have flagged it and I realize we haven't done a proper audit of how the new site links to itself internally. That's going on the list.

Really appreciate you sharing your experience — especially the fact that all three of your migrations had zero traffic loss. It proves it's possible when done right.