Rustici Software quietly powers 75% of the LMS market. Here’s how we helped Rustici redesign, relaunch, and consolidate three mission-critical sites simultaneously while protecting the organic traffic that drives their business.
eLearning end users may not have heard of Rustici Software, xAPI or SCORM, but across every piece of eLearning content that works across platforms there’s a good chance Rustici Software’s technology is running underneath it.
For industry insiders, engineers, and builders it’s a different story. They all know this LMS behemoth powering the interoperability standards and tools the entire industry runs on. SCORM.com alone pulls tens of thousands of organic visits per month from developers, content creators, and LMS admins who need technical documentation that actually explains how things work.
That kind of organic footprint is hard to build and easy to lose. Especially when you’re about to change everything at once.
Problem: Merge and Relaunch 3 Websites without Losing SEO Traffic
Rustici wasn’t migrating one website. They were relaunching all three (RusticiSoftware.com, SCORM.com, and xAPI.com) on the same timeline, with a redesign, a domain change for xAPI, cross-domain content moves, and a consolidation strategy that folded 54 separate SCORM Cloud pages into a single destination on RusticiSoftware.com.
Any one of those changes, handled poorly, can tank organic visibility for months. Running all of them in parallel multiplies the risk. Cross-domain redirects are where most migrations go sideways. A single misconfigured redirect chain can orphan pages from Google’s index, and when you’re redirecting between three domains simultaneously, the margin for error shrinks fast.
The business goal added another layer: Rustici wanted to shift their web presence’s center of gravity to RusticiSoftware.com, pulling traffic and link authority from the satellite domains into the primary brand. That meant the migration was both defensive (protect what we have) and offensive (consolidate authority and come out stronger).
Approach: A Phased Launch Approach
We treated this as three parallel migrations with a shared infrastructure. Every URL across all three domains got mapped (origin, destination, redirect type) in a single redirect mapping workbook. For pages where multiple legacy URLs consolidated into one (like the 54 SCORM Cloud pages rolling into /products/scorm-cloud/), we built a tracking structure that let us expand each final URL and see every original URL feeding into it, with traffic numbers for both.
The pre-launch QA covered crawlability, indexation signals, canonical tag behavior, internal linking integrity, and redirect chain validation across all three domains. Post-launch, we set up a monitoring cadence and built Rustici a cross-domain Google Analytics report that compared current traffic against the pre-launch baseline across every property. A tool they could run monthly without us.
We also had to account for traffic paths that looked like losses but weren’t. A significant portion of SCORM Cloud searches were landing on cloud.scorm.com (a login portal where we didn’t have Search Console access), and some xAPI documentation traffic had moved to GitHub. Both were legitimate destinations, not lost traffic. We adjusted the final analysis to reflect actual performance, not tracking artifacts.
Results: Portfolio Stability, and 699% Traffic Increase to Rustici Software
Across three simultaneous site launches, the adjusted numbers told the story: +350 visits (+0.86%) compared to the pre-launch baseline. Stability through a project that, on paper, had every reason to create volatility.
The authority consolidation worked exactly as planned. RusticiSoftware.com gained +13 Domain Rating and picked up +177 referring domains transferred via redirects from SCORM.com and xAPI.com. Organic users to RusticiSoftware.com jumped 669% as the consolidation took hold. Traffic that previously scattered across three domains was now landing where it belonged.
For context: multi-domain migrations at this scale typically stay volatile for 3–4 months post-launch. Holding performance steady while consolidating three brands’ link equity onto a single domain is the hard version of this project. Rustici came out the other side with more authority, not less.
Summary
Most agencies will tell you the goal of a migration is “don’t lose traffic.” That’s table stakes. The real goal here was to use the migration as a strategic lever, consolidating years of accumulated authority from SCORM.com and xAPI.com into RusticiSoftware.com so the primary brand emerged stronger.
That’s what happened. Rustici kept their organic footprint intact across 40,000+ monthly visits, transferred link equity from two high-authority domains, and came out of a triple-site relaunch with a primary domain that was measurably more powerful than when the project started.
We handed off a centralized analytics workbook for ongoing monitoring, flagged remaining redirect cleanup items for their dev team, and recommended cross-domain goal tracking so Rustici could measure conversions across the full property set going forward.