Google Explains A Weird Domain Migration Outcome
Google’s John Mueller offers insight into why three related domain name migrations had different outcomes despite following equal process
Google’s John Mueller offered an insight into why the domain name migrations between multiple language versions of the same website turned out vastly different even though the same process was followed for each of three websites.
Migrating To Different Domain Names
The person asking the question maintained three websites under three different country code top level domains (ccTLDs). The ccTLDs were .fr (France), .be (Belgium), and .de (Germany). The project was a migration from one domain name to another domain name, each within their respective ccTLD, like example-1.fr to example-2.fr.
Each site had the same content but in different languages that corresponded to the countries targeted by each of their respective ccTLD. Thus, because everything about the migration was equal the reasonable expectation was that the outcome of the migration would be the same for each site.
But that wasn’t the case.
Two out of the three site migrations failed and lost traffic. Only one of them experienced a seamless transition.
What Went Wrong?
The person asking for information about what went wrong tweeted:
“Hi @JohnMu,
AlicesGarden (.fr, .be, .de …) migrated to Sweeek (.fr, .be, .de …)
.FR and .BE lost a lot of traffic in Oct. 23
Other TLD performed well.
Redirects, canonical, hreflang, content, offer = OK
Search console migration = OKWhat else could be wrong ?”
Original tweet:
