> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://rafeblandford.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Modernising the archive: what the search data says - URL: https://rafeblandford.com/modernising-the-archive-search-data/ - Published: 2026-07-24T20:03:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-24T20:04:29.000Z - Description: Static, schema, Lighthouse to the top marks — did Google notice? Sixteen weeks of Search Console data on 145,000 modernised pages. - Author: Rafe Blandford - Tags: #ai, All About Archive In late March I migrated three mobile technology sites — All About Symbian, All About Windows Phone, and All About Mobile, 24,000 articles across roughly 145,000 pages — from a dying legacy server and LAMP code base to a modern static archive. I've written about [how the migration was done](https://rafeblandford.com/claude-code-as-a-migration-partner/), [the optimisation passes that followed](https://rafeblandford.com/optimising-a-decade-old-codebase/), and [adding structured data at scale](https://rafeblandford.com/adding-schema-org-to-145000-pages/). This post is about what happened next: whether any of that work shows up in Google's treatment of the sites. ## What changed, in SERP-signal terms Preservation was the goal, but the side effect was a full modernisation of everything Google's documentation says it cares about: - **Static delivery.** Dynamic CMS pages on ageing PHP became pre-rendered HTML behind a CDN. Time-to-first-byte and reliability improved overnight, and there is no longer an application layer to fall over mid-crawl. - **Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse.** The first optimisation pass took a representative page from Performance 71 / Accessibility 66 / Best Practices 73 / SEO 83 to 93 / 91 / 96 / 100\. Subsequent passes pushed further: today the All About Symbian homepage audits at 96 / 100 / 100 / 100 on mobile emulation. - **Structured data at scale.** From basic Article microdata to comprehensive JSON-LD across six content types — 4,504 review pages with proper Review schema, 81,117 forum threads with DiscussionForumPosting and comment markup, breadcrumbs on 23,000 pages. - **Crawl hygiene.** Sitemaps resubmitted, thousands of 404s and deprecated-schema warnings worked through as Search Console flagged them. None of this changed a word of content. The archive is frozen — no new posts, no updates, no promotion. Which makes it an unusually clean setting for the question: does technical quality alone move search performance? ## What Google did Search Console was set up the day after cutover, so the data starts with the modernised archive's first day — sixteen weeks of it now. ![Weekly Google Search clicks and click-through rate for allaboutsymbian.com over the first 15 full weeks](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/chart-aas-clicks-ctr.png) Three things stand out in the All About Symbian data: 1. **Clicks ratcheted up and held.** From 1,114 in the first full week to a sustained \~1,430 average over the last six weeks — up 29%, with no new content to explain it. 2. **Click-through rate rose from 1.06% to 1.26%.** When the pages appear in results, more people choose them. That's consistent with what richer snippets and faster pages are supposed to do — the listing itself got better, not just more frequent. 3. **The impressions curve tells a re-evaluation story.** Google spiked impressions to a peak in early May — around 177,000 in a week, plausibly re-testing the re-crawled pages across many queries — then settled roughly a third lower. Clicks held through that settling. Google showed the archive less, but better. ## Same treatment, three outcomes The section above tells a simple, positive story, but here's the slightly messier reality. All three sites got identical treatment. They did not get identical results. ![Weekly Google Search clicks for the three archive sites over the same period — All About Symbian up 29%, All About Windows Phone down 12%, All About Mobile up 1.7×](https://rafeblandford.com/content/images/2026/07/chart-three-sites.png) All About Mobile — the smallest site — grew the most, roughly 1.7× on both clicks and impressions, but I would take that with pinch of salt, given the low volume. All About Symbian gained steadily. All About Windows Phone drifted down 12%, though is now showing upward signs. Same schema scripts, same performance work, same infrastructure. The difference is presumably demand and competitive context per topic: technical quality changes how Google evaluates your pages, not how many people care about Windows Phone in 2026. ## Why this matters For a frozen archive, technical quality is the *only* lever there is — no new content, no outreach, nothing else to pull. What the data shows is that Google demonstrably re-evaluates: a site that will never publish again can still improve in search, because the ranking systems keep re-reading the signals you send. Twenty years of accumulated authority is an asset, but it pays out through a technical surface that either helps or hinders. For living sites the implication is sharper. These signals — speed, structured data, crawl hygiene — are the floor under everything else you do. And the cost of getting them right has collapsed: this entire modernisation, 145,000 pages, was days of agentic work rather than a quarter of engineering. The excuse for a slow, schema-less, error-ridden site is gone. The other quiet enabler is the measurement itself. The charts above come from programmatic Search Console access feeding a weekly analytics digest — the same instrumentation that flagged the trends in the first place. Modernise the site, but modernise the measurement with it.