Why would a site that ranked fine suddenly fail Google’s quality bar after moving domains? Here’s what I found and what I can’t yet prove.

There have been a number of reports recently of sites struggling to be properly indexed following a site migration.

I have consulted with a few sites on this issue and have developed a theory.

Please know that this theory is not something I can prove at this point. I am writing this blog post to generate discussion.

I believe that not only does a site migration trigger a new review of site quality from Google, but also that Google’s standards for site quality have become much stricter.

I was hired to do a site quality review for a site that blogs on a hobby topic. The site had previously performed well and was starting to see a slow decline over the last year or so. Just before I started my review, the site owner reached out to tell me that they had just started migrating to a new domain.

From what I can see, they did everything correctly. They submitted the change of address in Google Search Console, carefully mapped redirects, updated internal links, ensured Google could crawl the new site, and generated a sitemap for the new domain.

In the Page Indexing Report, 98% of their URLs were reported as not indexed.

Even worse, inspecting any page, including those 33 pages that Google said were indexed showed the same thing. The page was indeed not indexed.

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