Domain migration goes wrong. I have a few quesitons.
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So I did a domain migration 4-5 months ago, lost about 70-80% of the traffic and I still couldn't recover the traffic.
- Redirected everything 1:1
- Updated internal links
- Triggered change of address in GSC
- Monitoring the server logs (everything is perfect)
- Uploaded the old sitemap with the old URLs
What happened/ what have I noticed so far:
- Almost all URLs have been indexed on the new domain
- New content on the new domain is indexed in a matter of few hours
- There's only one particular page that still appears as "Crawled and indexed" on the old domain and still receives traffic. I tried to request the manual indexing so Google could figure out the page has been redirected but nothing has changed. I think this is a sign Google hasn't finished the domain migration process?
- Most WEBP images appear as "Crawled - currently not indexed" on the old domain. Shouldn't they appear as "Page with redirect"?
- The new domain is ranking pretty well on a bunch of keywords (they're like 2-3% of the total page count) while the rest of 97% of pages haven't appeared not even in the top 200 results (these pages don't receive a single impression)
- Google acts a bit strangely on crawling the old domain. He keeps crawling the category pages over and over again (sometimes I see 20-30 crawls on a single category page in a single day) while the inner pages and images are rarely crawled. Like I see 4-5 crawls on images per day maximum.
- The traffic and number of rankings keywords haven't changed a bit after the last Google updates. Does this indicate that we haven't been impacted by them?
So any suggestions on what else can I do to find out the reason why the website hasn't recovered? My guesses are:
- The process is still not finished (unlikely since it already passed 4-5 months)
- There's a technical error that I can't find (again, unlikely since I see nothing strange in the logs that'd indicate Google has problems fetching the site)
- Someone did something nasty (like blasting the website with backlinks or copying the content) that hindered the process? I see a couple of sites made in a language I can't read that literally copy and translate the content from my website and publish on theirs with the canonical URL my website URL. Also, two sites cloned mine after the migration but I managed to eliminate them in time.
- I had a lot of spammy backlinks on the old domain that have been automatically generated on the ranking pages over a few years. I haven't disavowed them because Google claimed they can identify and eliminate them. Now all those backlinks have instantly moved to the new domain which could put Google in panic mode and lower its trust in our website. Should I disavow them?
Please any help is highly appreciated.
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There are some other factors you might want to consider to help recover your traffic:
Speed and Performance of the New Site: Have you audited the new site for performance and speed? A slower site could impact your rankings and thus traffic. Google's PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for this.
Content Quality: Are you certain that all the content on the new domain is up to the same quality standards as the old site? If the content isn't as good, Google may not rank it as highly.
Mobile Friendliness: Make sure that your new domain is mobile-friendly. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your website is considered the primary version when determining rankings.
Backlink Profile: As you've guessed, your backlinks could be a potential issue. Although Google is smart enough to identify and ignore spammy backlinks, if a significant portion of your backlinks were low-quality, it could affect your new domain's authority and trustworthiness. You might want to disavow these backlinks, especially if you see any correlation between the backlinks and drop in traffic.
Duplicate Content: The sites that have cloned your site might be causing issues with duplicate content. Although you mention that they're using canonical URLs pointing back to your site, Google sometimes doesn't handle these perfectly. Reach out to these sites to request they remove the content.
Google Search Console: Make sure you're keeping an eye on Google Search Console for any potential crawl errors or manual actions Google might have taken against your site.
Geotargeting: If your website targets a specific region, you might want to ensure that you have set the geotargeting in GSC to the same region as it was set on your old domain.
Technical SEO: There may be some technical SEO issues you haven't spotted. Consider hiring a SEO consultant or agency to perform an in-depth technical audit.
Patience: Domain migrations can take a long time to fully recover. Some sites take up to a year to regain their previous traffic levels.
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Hey
ok so in that case i think you have to wait a bit and work on offpage strongly. Second, check if previous links are on their place, i mean all links! apart from that, in this specific case i think and guess(i can be wrong) google is not considering the site authority like before. you have to work on branding, social signals, social accounts, get some influencers sharing your site something like that. Hopefully you will get all your hard earned ranking back soon! Good Luck! -
@Fabian001 Hi Fabian, yes, everything is 100% the same as the old domain.
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@Anna33212 could I ask if the internal link structure leading to your "97% pages" is the same as your old website? Assuming that the 1:1 redirection for these 97% pages has no issues, then I wonder if the updated internal link structure is not as good as previously?
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