Google can keep a site migration in limbo for months. Mueller identifies an overlooked setting that may help end the uncertainty.

Google’s John Mueller suggested that a change of address for a domain and website can take longer than four months to process. He also provided insight on how to prevent that from happening in order to have a better outcome.

A site owner reported on Reddit that they had a successful domain migration at the beginning of 2026 and everything progressed relatively smoothly with traffic fully recovered by April.

Four months later Google restored the old domain’s search visibility, essentially deindexing the new domain and resurrecting the old version in the search results. Site visitors clicking to the old domain were still being redirected to the new version, which search console began reporting as crawled but not indexed.

“So I have a website that was doing very well, especially on Google. At the start of 2026, I changed the name and domain so that one additional topic could be covered. Did all the redirects, Change of Address, and internal name changes right away so traffic recovered quickly around the start of April.

Everything was indexed on the new site and the new domain was getting around 5,000 impressions per day. Four months later, Google suddenly reverted everything back to the old domain.

More than 5,000 pages of the new domain were changed to Crawled, Not Currently Index and the new domain now gets 20 impressions per week.

But if I open GSC on the old domain, everything is there.

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