A Weighted Risk Score for Redirects, Duplicates, and Orphans

A colleague once asked me, completely straight-faced, which of her 40,000 URLs she should worry about first. I opened the three audit files she'd been handed to help her decide, and here's the thing that stopped me: none of them agreed, and not one of them actually ranked anything. A redirect map sorts by redirects. A duplicate list sorts by duplicates. An orphan dump sorts by orphans. Ask them all at once which page bleeds hardest if you get it wrong, and you get three shrugs on three tabs. So I want to give every URL one number instead. Score redirect risk, duplicate content, and orphaned files each 0 to 5, weight redirect risk highest, add them up, and you have a ranked triage list: what to move with care, what to consolidate, what to let go without a eulogy. This article hands you the formula and the thresholds.

Why one score beats three separate reports

Most pre-migration audits produce three disconnected spreadsheets: a redirect map, a duplicate-content list, and an orphaned-asset dump. Each is useful, but none tells you which page to fix first when you have 40,000 URLs and six weeks. A composite score forces a shared scale, so a high-authority page that is also duplicated and links to a missing PDF rises to the top, where it belongs, instead of hiding in the middle of three separate lists.

The goal is not precision to two decimals. It is defensible ranking: when a stakeholder asks why you migrated one page and killed another, the score is your answer.

The three inputs, defined

1. Redirect risk (weight 0.5)

This is the cost of losing the URL. Score it by combining external link equity, organic entrances, and conversion role. A page with referring domains and steady organic traffic scores 5; a parameterized URL with zero inbound signals scores 0. High scores mean the redirect must be one-to-one and tested; low scores can be collapsed or dropped.

2. Duplicate content (weight 0.3)

Score how much this URL overlaps others by shingled text similarity. Near-exact copies (95%+) score 5 and signal a consolidation decision. Templated boilerplate that inflates similarity but carries unique core content scores lower. High duplicate scores paired with high redirect risk are the trickiest: you want the equity, but you cannot migrate five copies of it.

3. Orphaned files (weight 0.2)

Two failure modes live here. Orphaned assets are files (PDFs, images, downloads) that exist and get direct traffic but sit outside the crawlable link graph, easy to miss in a content-model export. Broken references are links pointing to files that no longer resolve. Score by traffic to the asset plus the count of pages that depend on it. A gated whitepaper with backlinks scores 5; a stray thumbnail scores 1.

The formula

RiskScore = (Redirect x 0.5) + (Duplicate x 0.3) + (Orphan x 0.2)
Range: 0.0 to 5.0

Weight redirect risk highest because a lost redirect is the failure users and search engines feel immediately and permanently. Duplicate content is a quality problem you can fix on either side of the migration. Orphaned files are the quiet killer: cheap to catch pre-migration, expensive to discover from a 404 report three weeks after go-live.

Reading the score

Score | Band | Action
3.5–5.0 | Critical | Manual review, verified 1:1 redirect, regression-test after cutover
2.0–3.4 | Elevated | Consolidate duplicates, confirm asset links, batch-validate redirects
0.8–1.9 | Routine | Migrate in bulk, spot-check
0.0–0.7 | Low | Candidate to kill or 410; skip if no signals

Worked example

Take a product-comparison page: 22 referring domains and 4,000 monthly organic entrances (Redirect = 5), 88% text overlap with two regional variants (Duplicate = 4), and it links to a spec sheet PDF that returns 404 (Orphan = 4).

(5 x 0.5) + (4 x 0.3) + (4 x 0.2) = 2.5 + 1.2 + 0.8 = 4.5

Score 4.5, Critical band. The plan writes itself: keep this URL, pick one canonical version and consolidate the regional variants into it, restore or replace the PDF before cutover, and put the redirect on the must-test list.

How to gather the inputs

Redirect risk: join your crawl to Search Console (queries, clicks), Google Analytics (entrances, conversions), and a backlink source (referring domains). Normalize each to 0–5.

Duplicate content: run shingled or MinHash similarity across rendered body text, not raw HTML, so navigation and footers do not inflate scores.

Orphaned files: diff the link graph against the asset inventory in both directions: files with no inbound links, and links with no resolving file.

This cross-referencing is exactly what a pre-migration content-intelligence pass automates: it crawls the site, joins the traffic and link signals, and returns a per-URL migrate / rewrite / kill call instead of three disconnected exports. If you are scoping this by hand, our migration planning guide walks through the inventory join step by step.

Common mistakes that skew the score

Counting boilerplate as duplicate content. Strip shared templates first, or your product pages will all look like copies of each other.

Ignoring assets in the content model. Many exports move pages but not the files those pages depend on. Orphan scoring catches this before the links break.

Treating all traffic equally. A page with entrances but zero conversions and no links may still be safe to consolidate. Blend the signals; do not lean on one.

Scoring once. Re-score after consolidation. Killing duplicates changes which URL should inherit the redirect.

The score does not make the decision for you. It makes the decision rankable, explainable, and repeatable. Which is what turns a chaotic replatform into a defensible plan.

Where to start

So, plainly: do not try to score everything on day one. Here's what I'd actually do, and it's what I wish I'd told my colleague before she scrolled herself dizzy. Take your top 500 URLs by traffic and run the three inputs there, because that small pile is where most of the redirect risk and the duplicate clusters genuinely live. The long tail can sit quietly for now. Score those 500, watch how the bands feel, and tune your weights while the stakes are still low. Once the Critical and Elevated rows stop reading as arbitrary and start reading as obvious, turn the same math loose on the whole site. Then, the next time someone leans over and asks which of the forty thousand goes first, you don't shrug at three tabs. You point at one number, and the list has already written the order for you.