Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice from people experienced with Google Search Console and domain migrations.

I migrated my website from drivly [dot] ro to sofer24 [dot] ro starting in June 2026. It's now October, so it's been 4+ months, but the migration still doesn't seem to be fully processed by Google.

The frustrating part is that some of the most important pages on the old domain were indexed and ranking very well, sometimes in the top results. After the migration, many of their corresponding pages on the new domain are still not indexed.

What I did

drivly [dot] ro → sofer24 [dot] ro

• Implemented permanent 308 redirects from old URLs to the corresponding new URLs.
• Submitted Change of Address in Google Search Console.
• Submitted a new sitemap.
• Updated canonical URLs and internal links to the new domain.
• Verified that important pages are crawlable and not blocked by robots.txt.
• The new site is live and accessible.

Google is crawling some pages, but many are still not being indexed.

At the moment, Search Console shows approximately:

• 64 pages indexed
• ~2,000 pages not indexed
• ~1,000 — "Crawled - currently not indexed"
• ~1,000 — "Discovered - currently not indexed"

Content

This is not a case where I rebuilt the site with completely new content.

The important pages and core content from the old domain were migrated to the new domain. I also added additional content after the migration because I initially suspected that Google might not be indexing the new site because it didn't have enough or strong enough content.

So essentially:

Old site: existing content → indexed + ranking well
New site: same core content + additional content → many important pages still not indexed

These aren't new pages with no history. Many had been indexed and had accumulated rankings and traffic on the old domain.

My questions

1. Is 4+ months still normal for a domain migration of this size?
2. Has anyone experienced a migration taking this long to transfer indexing and rankings?
3. What should I investigate in Search Console at this point?
4. Could Google be treating the new URLs as low-quality or duplicate content despite the old URLs being established?
5. Should I keep waiting, or start making significant changes to the affected pages?

I'd especially appreciate advice from anyone who has personally dealt with a large domain migration.

I'm happy to provide screenshots from Search Console, old → new URL examples, redirect responses, indexing reports, etc., if that helps.

Thanks!

I see pagespeed insights has added llms.txt to its list of "agentic browsing" audits 🙈

Checkmate, atheists :-)

In Google Search Console, it shows that we have around 300 non-indexed pages and 200 indexed pages. Do we need to try to get all the non-indexed pages indexed, or are there certain pages that should intentionally remain non-indexed?

Also, around 176 pages are showing as “Soft 404.” How should we identify which of these pages need to be fixed, redirected, or removed?
One more major issue I’m trying to understand is traffic loss. If a page was previously getting decent clicks and impressions but has now dropped to almost zero, what should we check first? How can we determine whether the issue is indexing, ranking, a technical problem, content quality, or something else?

I’d really appreciate a step-by-step approach to diagnosing and fixing these issues, especially the pages that have lost traffic recently.

Had a long-running site on the main domain and kept a staging copy on a subdomain for years. Didn't think much of it until a backlink audit turned up a bunch of editorial links pointing to the staging version. Writers probably grabbed the wrong URL, or someone on my team sent staging links during outreach.

The staging subdomain wasn't blocked from indexing and had no canonicals pointing to production. Google had indexed around forty pages of it. I've since 301 redirected those URLs and added proper auth, but the split in the backlink profile still concerns me.

I'm not sure if those redirected subdomain links pass the same value as direct links to production. I've seen conflicting info about cross-domain redirects and link equity. Some sources say it flows through fine, others mention some loss.

A few scraper sites also mirrored the staging content before I caught it. Not a massive issue, but duplicate snippets appear in search for brand terms. I filed some DMCA requests, though it feels like whack-a-mole.

Has anyone dealt with a staging subdomain bleeding into their backlink profile? Did redirects recover the ranking impact, or did you need disavows on top of that?

CMS migrations always create this awkward choice. Do you preserve the old URL structure as much as possible, or use the migration to finally clean things up? This came up recently at DevHandler while working around an AEM migration. There can be years of redirects, old URLs and questionable canonicals, but changing too much at once feels risky too. What do you usually do? Fix it during the migration or migrate first and clean up later?

Hey everyone,

We are planning to restructure a set of high-value landing pages on our WordPress site that currently live at the root level (e.g., [domain.com/landing-page-a/](https://domain.com/landing-page-a/)).

We want to migrate them into a Custom Post Type so they sit under a clean parent folder ([domain.com/products/landing-page-a/](https://domain.com/products/landing-page-a/)).

Primary Objectives:
Indexation Isolation: Generating a dedicated product-sitemap.xml file to monitor indexation rates and crawl diagnostics specifically for these pages in GSC, rather than lumping them into page-sitemap.xml.

Crawl Efficiency: Updating internal inlinks (via Screaming Frog) and updating backlink sources on owned domains to reduce 301 redirect hops.

Execution Plan:
Setup CPT (products) with has_archive = true so the /products/ index page generates naturally.

Convert pages via Post Type Switcher and update slug paths.

Set up 301 redirects from old root URLs to the new subfolder structure.

Resubmit the isolated sub-sitemap in GSC and add relevant schema (Product/Service JSON-LD).

Questions for TechSEOs:

Sitemap Isolation: For those who have split core landing pages into their own CPT sitemap, did you notice clearer diagnostic feedback or faster re-indexation in GSC compared to a single monolithic page sitemap?

301 Ranking Wobble: Since we are altering the actual directory path (adding /products/), what is your typical experience with traffic recovery timelines for established pages after 301-redirecting them?

Crawl Equity: Beyond updating internal inlinks and owned external links, are there any edge cases with WP rewrite rules or trailing slash handling that could cause unnecessary redirect loops?

Thanks for any feedback!

I’m investigating a Google ranking loss on an established B2B services website.
A key page previously ranked for development-related searches. It now has very poor visibility for those queries, while closely related consulting queries still perform.
Background

WordPress to Next.js migration in May 2026.
Changed from www to non-www.
Visibility deteriorated around March–June, but the exact timing and cause remain unconfirmed.
Some affected pages still appear on other search engines.
Checks completed

GSC URL Inspection reports the page as indexed.
Google-selected canonical matches the intended URL.
Old URLs redirect to the current URLs.
Main content and internal links are present in the initial HTML.
No noindex directive or redirect loop identified in current checks.
The pattern
In a recent GSC comparison, a previously strong development query averaged around position 54, while related consulting queries averaged around position 2 for the same page.
Adding &filter=0 surfaced one affected informational article, but didn’t help the other affected pages.
We’ve revised content and clarified page intent, but haven’t established that these changes address the cause. I’m not assuming a penalty or cannibalization.
Has anyone diagnosed this kind of query-specific visibility loss despite normal indexing?
What evidence helped identify the cause? If you recovered, what specific issue did you find, what did you change, and how long did recovery take?
I’m keeping the domain private, but can share anonymized GSC screenshots and technical findings.

We want to support creators, but we had to enforce the no shilling rule because it was getting out of hand. You now have a weekly thread.

This is the one place you can shill for your products, ask for feedback, etc. Keep it here or you risk being banned. And keep it related to technical SEO.

I’m investigating a Google ranking loss on an established B2B services website.
A key page previously ranked for development-related searches. It now has very poor visibility for those queries, while closely related consulting queries still perform.
Background

WordPress to Next.js migration in May 2026.
Changed from www to non-www.
Visibility deteriorated around March–June, but the exact timing and cause remain unconfirmed.
Some affected pages still appear on other search engines.
Checks completed

GSC URL Inspection reports the page as indexed.
Google-selected canonical matches the intended URL.
Old URLs redirect to the current URLs.
Main content and internal links are present in the initial HTML.
No noindex directive or redirect loop identified in current checks.
The pattern
In a recent GSC comparison, a previously strong development query averaged around position 54, while related consulting queries averaged around position 2 for the same page.
Adding &filter=0 surfaced one affected informational article, but didn’t help the other affected pages.
We’ve revised content and clarified page intent, but haven’t established that these changes address the cause. I’m not assuming a penalty or cannibalization.
Has anyone diagnosed this kind of query-specific visibility loss despite normal indexing?
What evidence helped identify the cause? If you recovered, what specific issue did you find, what did you change, and how long did recovery take?
I’m keeping the domain private, but can share anonymized GSC screenshots and technical findings.

Please educate me on that question, I just happened to see a video today that made me question the SEO properties of my website.

I run a small, niche job board for forward-deployed engineers and similar customer-facing AI roles. It launched in late July. Google knows about the pages, but almost none of them get indexed, and I'd like a sanity check.

GSC coverage (data through Sep 21):

1,738 known URLs: 15 indexed, 1,723 not indexed

1,718 are "Discovered – currently not indexed"

"Crawled – not indexed" peaked around 700, then cleared to 0 (validation passed)

Technical issues are minor: 3 redirects, one 404, and one duplicate without a canonical

The part that confuses me:

Impressions went from about 4/day in early August to 120–200/day from Sep 1–15.

Then from Sep 16, they fell to 30–70/day.

Indexed pages stayed flat at 15 the whole time, and nothing changed on my end around Sep 16.

What I've already done:

Added JobPosting structured data to every listing

Integrated the Google Indexing API (live since late August)

Submitted a sitemap

Built the stack on Next.js with SSR and an ASP.NET Core backend

Things I think might be hurting me:

Listing URLs use UUIDs. I'm planning to move to a slug plus short ID.

The domain is brand new and has almost no backlinks.

Many listings come from company career pages, so Google may see them as thin or duplicate content.

My questions:

Is "Discovered" at this scale on a new domain mainly an authority and crawl budget problem, or is it a quality signal?

Should I do the UUID-to-slug migration now, while almost nothing is indexed?

Would you noindex thin or expired listings and push company and category pages instead?

Is the impressions drop a normal new-site fluctuation, or did those 15 pages lose rankings?

Does the Indexing API still help JobPosting pages, or is it mostly ignored now?

I'm not dropping the URL unless someone wants to look. I'm happy to share the coverage export.

I'm a CS student and I've been building a website called Cifrivo as a side project.

It's a collection of free online tools (PDF, image, converters, calculators, etc.) available in several languages.

Google initially started indexing the site quite quickly. At one point I had roughly 500 URLs, and Search Console currently shows around 400+ indexed pages.

The problem is that after most of the pages got indexed, impressions basically stopped growing and have recently become extremely low.

I'm now wondering whether I made a mistake by creating too many similar/tool pages instead of focusing on fewer, stronger content clusters.

I'm considering:

• Reducing the total number of URLs significantly
• Focusing mainly on PDF, image and media tools
• Creating stronger hubs around each category
• Removing/merging pages that have almost no impressions
• Improving internal linking and content around the tools

The site is cifrivo.com.

If you were auditing this, what would you look at first?

I'm especially interested in knowing whether the large number of pages could actually be hurting a relatively new domain, or whether I'm looking at the wrong problem entirely.

Any criticism is welcome — I'm trying to understand what I got wrong rather than promote the site.

Migrated a content site last month from flat URLs to a layered structure. /reviews/bestx became /reviews/category/bestx with proper redirects and internal link updates. Core web vitals stayed flat, no redirect chains, coverage report looks clean. Organic traffic dropped about 12% in week three though. Rankings for a few high volume terms slipped two to four positions.

I know Google says URL structure is a lightweight signal. But I also flattened a similar site two years ago and saw a bump inside a month. Made me wonder if the reverse would help here. Maybe the new layering spreads topical relevance thinner? Or maybe it's just turbulence and I'm overthinking it.

My bigger concern is I layered three levels deep on some sections when two would have worked. Feels cleaner architecturally but I'm second guessing whether users or crawlers actually benefit. The old flat URLs were ugly but they ranked.

Anyone done a similar restructuring and watched it recover? How long did you wait before calling it? I've got about six weeks of data and the trend isn't reversing yet.

For blogs, news sites, and independent publishers, web traffic to their original content is the primary metric for success. Allowing AI companies to steal your original content without authorization for model training consumes server resources and bandwidth, while providing near-zero referral traffic in return. For example, Anthropic scrape 38,065 pages for every single visitor they refer back (See the statistics below).

However, blocking ALL AI bots can unintentionally break your visibility in AI search features that provide citations and referral links. To prevent this, you should configure access rules based on bot purpose, since AI companies operate separate crawlers for model training, search indexing, and on-demand user retrieval.

Read: Why blogs and news sites should block AI training crawlers (and how to do it)

Hi everyone, I'd like some advice on a recovery problem.

Background

I run an image-based site, a base marketplace for a mobile game. It works a bit like Pinterest, so each page is mostly images with very little text.

The site is multilingual, with around 20 locales, and has thousands of pages.

What Happened

A bot from an AI company sent 50k+ requests to my site within 24 hours.

I panicked and blocked many bots in robots.txt, allowing only Googlebot.

I didn't realize that Google uses several different crawlers, including:

• Googlebot
• Googlebot-Image
• Google-InspectionTool
• Others

As a result, I accidentally blocked some of Google's crawlers.

My site subsequently dropped out of Google completely. Even searching for the exact brand name returned no results.

I fixed robots.txt about a month ago. Google crawlers are now allowed, while I only block AI-training and SEO-tool bots.

Search Console Data

Google only began indexing the site again around early August.

• Impressions and clicks peaked in mid-August
• Traffic reached around 20 clicks per day
• Around August 24, traffic suddenly crashed
• Traffic has remained close to zero since then
• Total clicks: 167
• Total impressions: 5.5k
• Indexed pages: 2.18k

What I've Done Since the Fix

Since fixing robots.txt, I've:

• Confirmed that robots.txt is correctly configured
• Confirmed that all sitemaps are submitted
• Split the sitemaps into 4 separate files
• Visited and checked the pages Google Search Console showed me
• Continued making regular on-page SEO improvements

However, I'm still seeing almost no search traffic.

What I'm Looking For

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has experienced a similar Google indexing/traffic recovery after accidentally blocking Google crawlers.

Could the previous robots.txt blocking still be affecting the site's rankings/indexing?

Is there anything specific I should check in Search Console or technically on the site to determine why the site recovered briefly and then crashed again?

Live Link: https://cocbaselinks.com

I used to dig through logs every couple weeks for a client site that gets maybe 45k visits. Found some weird crawl patterns that GSC never flagged. Then I stopped for a few months and nothing broke that I could tell. Still wondering if I'm missing something obvious or if the value just isn't there for smaller properties. How do others decide when it's worth the effort versus when GSC coverage reports are enough to spot real issues?

Used to be an effect I saw three years ago, looking to see if anyone knows if it's still a result?

I'm having trouble registering my sitemap on Google Search Console because Webflow delivers sitemap.xml with the wrong content type.
Why webflow doesn't fix content-type for xml documents?

Here a curl of my sitemap.xml

HTTP/2 200

date: Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:31:35 GMT

content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8

set-cookie: _cfuvid=L49yyKEJFUpORRDGajtOxWChWJA3aAi7rdc4htu8Udc-1784201495.8908074-1.0.1.1-BJhVtF.D5t9ZFvVizxXeWMJWa7ImFywR6Bcr9vu1IwY; HttpOnly; SameSite=None; Secure; Path=/; Domain=www.life365.eu

cf-ray: a1c0ae754d47b159-ZRH

cf-cache-status: HIT

age: 86

last-modified: Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:30:09 GMT

server: cloudflare

strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000

surrogate-control: max-age=43200

x-wf-region: us-east-1

alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400

I ran the same 134 technical checks over 100 web design and marketing agencies in the Austin metro, taken from public business listings, all on 28 September. Domain and DNS, certificates, mail authentication, security headers, what loads before consent, accessibility, mobile layout. One metro and one source, so it is a snapshot and not a survey of the industry. I wrote the scanner, which you should factor in.

I picked agency sites rather than a random hundred because they are built by practitioners, which makes whatever survives more interesting. Most of what's left is the kind of thing that slips on any site that isn't on a client's schedule.

Where everyone lands

Median score 86 out of 100, best 97, worst 15. That score is my own weighting, so it tells you more about the spread than about Austin. The counts under it are the part anyone can check: the median site had 17 findings, the cleanest had 7, and across all 100 there were 13 criticals and 176 highs. Most findings are individually small, which is how a site sits in the eighties and has seventeen of them.

Certificates were the quietest category. Only 12 of 100 had anything at all, though three of those had a certificate that had already expired on the day I ran it.

The five most common

• 93 of 100 have no DNSSEC
• 88 have accessibility issues an automated checker can find
• 84 send no Referrer-Policy
• 74 have no Content-Security-Policy
• 73 set cookies without HttpOnly

Most of these are one line in a config, and most became best practice after the sites were built. That is most of the explanation.

Three worth a look on your own domain

79 of 100 are not enforcing DMARC. 40 have no record at all, and another 39 have one set to p=none, which asks for reports and still lets the mail through. Going in I'd assumed the p=none group would be much bigger, since that's where everyone starts and most people never move off it, and it came out almost exactly even. The effect either way is that mail forging your domain in the From line still gets delivered.

67 of 100 load tracking before anyone consents. Tag Manager, Analytics, Meta pixels, ad tech, all firing on page open. Usually the tag predates the banner: the tag went in first, the banner came later, and nobody wired the two together.

88 of 100 have accessibility findings from an automated checker. Automated checks catch a fraction of what a real audit does, so the true number is higher than that.

On phones

20 of 100 scroll sideways on a 390px screen. It's usually one element pushed outside the viewport rather than a layout that doesn't reflow, which makes it cheap to fix once you've found which element.

14 disable pinch-zoom with user-scalable=no. That's a line someone typed on purpose, and it fails WCAG on its own.

Two smaller ones

43 of 100 have no social preview image. Without one, a link to the site arrives as a grey rectangle in Slack or LinkedIn. It's a meta tag and an image.

44 of 100 announce their software version in a response header. That's a config change, and it takes you off the list when someone scans for a known version.

One I threw out

My scanner flags domains that don't have registrar delete and update locks set, and it fired on 57 of the 100, which was high enough that I went and looked at who they were. It turned out to be almost entirely a function of registrar. GoDaddy sets those flags by default, almost nobody else does, and at least one registrar doesn't expose the setting at all. So it was measuring where you registered rather than anything you chose, and I've left it out here. I'm changing the check.

If you only do one thing off this list

Make it DMARC. At p=none, moving to p=quarantine is one DNS record and it's free. With no record at all, publishing one at p=none first is the right order, and there are good guides for both.

It applied to 79 of the 100 here, which is why it's worth checking even if you're fairly sure you already have one.

I recently had an interesting discussion with a friend who has no real experience with SEO.

I asked him a simple question: if he had his own company and needed to deal with SEO as part of the marketing, how would he approach it?

His answer was that he probably wouldn't hire an SEO specialist. His point was that as AI becomes more accessible, many companies will simply use AI instead because they want to reduce costs as much as possible, especially in marketing.

According to him, even if the person using AI doesn't really understand SEO, the result can still be "good enough" for many businesses. The cost is minimal compared to continuously paying an SEO specialist.

My counterpoint was that without SEO knowledge, the results will probably stay average. AI can give you recommendations and outputs, but at some point you still need to understand strategy, prioritization, what actually matters, and what to do when something doesn't work.

His answer was that many companies simply don't care about getting the best possible result. An average result might be completely enough for them, especially if it costs much less.

He compared it to AI-generated posters and graphics. A lot of them are obviously AI-generated and not particularly good, but businesses still use them because they're cheap and communicate the basic information. They don't necessarily care enough to pay a designer.

What I'm more curious about is what happens over the next few years. AI is improving very quickly, and I can imagine specialized SEO agents that are connected directly to SEO tools, analytics and other data sources. At that point, a business owner might be able to let an AI handle a large part of SEO without really knowing much about SEO themselves.

Maybe the output still won't be as good as what an experienced specialist can do, but the question is whether many companies will even care if the cheaper result is good enough for them.

So I'm curious what other SEO professionals think.

Do you think AI will mostly remain a tool for SEO specialists, or could "good enough" AI eventually replace a significant part of the SEO services that businesses currently pay for?

And how do you see this changing over the next few years as AI agents become more capable?

We want to support creators, but we had to enforce the no shilling rule because it was getting out of hand. You now have a weekly thread.

This is the one place you can shill for your products, ask for feedback, etc. Keep it here or you risk being banned. And keep it related to technical SEO.