The question usually starts with a status code: will a 301 preserve the value of the old URL? I would start one step earlier. Does the new page still satisfy the reason someone linked to the old one?
“SEO equity” is convenient shorthand for several things: links, relevance, indexing signals, and the history associated with a URL. It is not a balance you can move between accounts. Google says permanent redirects do not inherently lose PageRank. That does not promise unchanged rankings after a move. Content, internal links, accessibility, and the destination can all change at the same time.
The destination is the important decision
Imagine retiring /guides/account-recovery and redirecting it to the homepage. The request succeeds. The reader still has to find the guide again. A replacement account-recovery guide is a much stronger mapping than a generic landing page.
I would keep a small migration table with four fields: old URL, intended destination, reason for the mapping, and validation result. “Everything else goes home” deserves a separate review. When there is genuinely no replacement, an honest not-found response may be more useful than pretending every old page has moved somewhere relevant.
Check the whole journey
For an illustrative move from /help/reset to /support/reset-password, verify that the old URL redirects directly to the final HTTPS URL, that the destination serves the expected content, and that its canonical points to the intended indexable page. Update navigation and contextual links so the site stops advertising the retired address.
A useful command is:
curl -sS -L -D - -o /dev/null https://example.com/help/reset
Read every response, not just the last 200. A successful final request can hide several unnecessary hops.
What I would watch after launch
Separate migration health from search performance. Track redirect failures, destination errors, indexing changes, and the traffic to the affected page group. Compare equivalent periods and account for seasonality. A ranking change alone does not identify its cause.
The practical goal is continuity: the link should still take a person to the thing they expected. The redirect supports that goal; it does not replace it.