A site migration is supposed to be a technical project. Redirects, sitemaps, the change of address tool. Do those right, and Google should pick up the new domain. But what happens when it doesn’t?
Writing in Search Engine Journal, Marie Haynes has been consulting on recent migration cases and has put forward a theory for discussion: the migration itself may trigger a stricter quality review.
The case: everything right, 98% still not indexed
One hobby blog she reviewed had done the migration by the book. The owner submitted a change of address in Google Search Console, mapped redirects carefully, updated internal links, generated a sitemap, and confirmed Google could crawl the new domain.
The Page Indexing Report told a different story: 98% of URLs were listed as not indexed. Even the 33 pages Google claimed were indexed turned out, on inspection, to be classified as ‘crawled – currently not indexed’.
A live URL test confirmed the pages could be indexed if certain conditions were met. There was no manual action, no duplication problem. Google recognized the new canonical and the old pages redirected properly. That left one explanation in Google’s own documentation: page quality.
Google’s quality bar is doing the real work
Google’s helpful content guidance now breaks down the ‘main content’ of a page into four signals: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy.
In this case, the site was well written and thorough. The problem was originality. Page after page offered commodity content – essentially the same information already available across other sites. Google describes originality as the extent to which content offers ‘unique, original information or perspectives that aren’t already available on other websites.’
That’s the uncomfortable part. The old domain had performed fine. Why would the new one suddenly fail a quality test? Haynes’s theory: the migration acts as a trigger for a stricter assessment. If Google applied this bar to every site on the internet, she argues, most would see catastrophic losses – but a migration may be the moment the stricter review kicks in.
What to do when your migration stalls
Start with the technical checklist, because most migration failures still are technical:
- Confirm old pages redirect properly.
- Record the change of address in Search Console.
- Run the Live Test to verify Google can see your content.
- Bring in an SEO to dig deeper if needed.
Then be patient. Migrations take time to process. In this case, however, four months had passed and only the homepage was indexed. That’s a signal something deeper is wrong.
If quality is the real issue, the fix is harder – and it’s not technical. Produce a small number of genuinely original, insightful articles. For many sites, that means a new content direction. Writing about what the world already knows is no longer enough.
One open question: will Google judge those new pages on their own value, or against a site-wide quality score dragged down by the commodity content? Haynes doesn’t have an answer yet. Her fallback is stark: some sites may need to start over on a new domain with entirely new content, because no technical SEO fix will bring back a domain full of unoriginal pages.
Source: Search Engine Journal
