A domain migration can look done — traffic recovered, rankings back, the old URL quietly redirecting — and then Google can flip it all back four months later. A site owner described exactly that on Reddit, and John Mueller’s answer points to the signals most migration checklists skip.
The case: recovered by April, reverted by August
The marketer rebranded and moved to a new domain at the start of 2026, set up redirects, submitted a Search Console Change of Address, and updated internal links. By early April the new domain was pulling in around 5,000 impressions a day.
Four months later, Google restored the old domain in search results. More than 5,000 pages on the new site switched to “crawled, not currently indexed,” and the new domain fell to about 20 impressions a week. Visitors still land on the right content — the old listings redirect — but the equity went back to the old URL.
What most likely held the old domain alive
The Reddit post left out several details that decide a migration’s fate. Before you migrate, run through this list:
- Absolute URLs: old-domain links hardcoded in navigation, footers or content instead of relative paths.
- Redirect quality: a registrar-level redirect may not preserve URL paths, and HTTPS forwarding can fail without an SSL certificate on the old domain.
- Redirect chains: extra hops weaken signals and complicate crawling.
- Changed site structure: redirects break when the new site’s navigation moves.
- XML sitemap: if it still lists the old domain, it sends conflicting canonical signals.
Mueller’s fix: migrate both host variants
John Mueller said these reversions can simply take a long time to process. One thing that helps, he noted, is to set up Change of Address in Search Console for both the www and non-www versions of the domain.
That’s a canonicalization lesson. When Google picks a domain to index and rank, inbound links to either hostname variant can quietly vote for the old version. Treat a migration gone wrong as a canonicalization problem first.
For growth teams, a reverted migration is worse than a failed one. You’ve spent months rebuilding equity on the new domain, and now every old-domain listing is a redirect-dependent result. If that redirect fails, lapses, or is out of your control, the recovered traffic disappears with it.
Your pre-migration checklist
Crawl the old domain with a tool like Screaming Frog to catch hardcoded absolute URLs. Verify your redirects preserve paths and avoid chains. Update the sitemap to the new domain. And submit Change of Address for both www and non-www. The migration isn’t finished when traffic recovers — it’s finished when Google stops changing its mind.
Source: Search Engine Journal
