Domain Migration and Subsequent Organic Traffic Loss

[biondi]

Hey guys,

About two months ago I migrated three websites, that were all doing reasonably well into one new domain. There were problems with one of the older domain names that were causing me issues with advertisers due to the name and all were in the same niche so it made sense to combine. I performed the migrations via 301 redirects in the .htaccess file and informed Google via the Search Console. All urls remained the same (apart from the domain).

Two months on my organic traffic is about 75% down. The vast majority of my posts are not ranking anywhere or are ranked 100+ in the SERP - I have around 280 articles on the site currently.
There are no 404 problems and I’ve manually requested Google re-index several pages and ensured the sitemap is present. There are no Manual actions outstanding and the new domain (despite being new) doesn’t have a shady history. There are no pages (that I want) being blocked by robots.txt - nothing I do though seems to help the ranking of any of those posts that aren't anywhere to be found on the new domain.

Has anyone seen this before? Not having done it, I’m not sure if it just takes a long time to sort itself out… It’s weird how some pages are ranking the same (snippet and 1) but others that were in this position, are literally nowhere. I have no idea what to do about it apart from waiting it out. We're still creating content and have created about 40 or so articles in the last few weeks but none of these are anywhere to be found either.

If anyone has been through this and has some experience to share or any pointers - I'd love to hear them!

Thanks,

Matt

 

[Community]

There shouldnt really be any loss at all, has there been any enviroment changes ( i.e hosting, DNS ), have you double checked all 301's are still working ? Is there any performance/site speed differences ?

Have you done any site audits to highlight any problems that may have been easy to overlook ?

 

[biondi]

Hi, yes - the new domain was on a new host. All 301's are working fine - the speed isn't any slower than previous. I've performed several site audits, yes but nothing has become apparent as the root cause as yet - hence looking for someone who might have experience in actually doing this previously.

 

[Community]

Hi Biondi,

Feel free to shoot me a message, We've done hundreds of migrations.

Are there any location differences of where the old host/server was located and the new one ?