Moving your site to a new domain keeps going wrong
Barry Schwartz asked why Google still showed an old domain four months after a move, and two SEOs said they see the same thing all the time.
Two well known SEOs say they are seeing more site moves that never recover. Barry Schwartz asked publicly why Google would still show an old domain four months after a site moved to a new one. Glenn Gabe and Marie Haynes both replied that botched domain changes are showing up in their inboxes repeatedly.
Gabe said he has had an uptick in site owners contacting him about failed domain name changes over the past few months, and got another email about one the day before. His advice is blunt.
Do not change domains unless you have to
"DO NOT go through a big migration (or domain name change) unless you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO," Gabe wrote, adding that Google has basically said the same thing.
DO NOT go through a big migration (or domain name change) unless you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO
Marie Haynes said she is seeing the same pattern. She offered a theory for why. She thinks moving a site to a new address makes Google take a fresh look at the quality of the whole site, and that Google is being stricter about what it indexes (adds to its searchable list of pages) than it used to be.
In the cases she sees, she says Google Search Console (Google's free tool that shows how your site is doing in search) often shows all of the pages sitting under "crawled - currently not indexed". That means Google has looked at the pages and decided not to put them in search results.
Her read on why is uncomfortable. She described most of these as decent sites whose content offers nothing original compared with what is already indexed. Google, she noted, keeps repeating that it wants original, insightful content that shows talent, skill and genuine effort.
What this means for you
If you are thinking about moving to a shinier domain name, a rebrand, or merging two sites into one, the risk is not just a few weeks of wobbly rankings. It is that your pages may not come back at all.
This is two SEOs reporting what they see in client work, not a Google announcement, so treat it as a warning rather than a rule. But both are saying the same thing at the same time, which is worth noticing.
The practical step is simple. Do not change your domain unless there is a real business reason you cannot avoid. A nicer name is not a real reason.
If you have already moved and traffic has not recovered, open Search Console, click Pages, and look for how many of your URLs sit under "crawled - currently not indexed". If most of them are there, the problem is not your redirects. It is that Google does not think the pages add anything new, and the fix is making the content genuinely better than what already ranks.
I have a theory. I think a site migration triggers a new quality assessment.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.