Your site launched. Traffic dropped. Rankings disappeared. Brian K Clayton diagnoses exactly what broke during your migration and fixes it in the correct sequence to recover Google rankings as fast as possible.
Website migrations break SEO when the new site has different URLs, missing redirects, incorrect canonicals, or blocks crawlers. Google interprets missing redirects as deleted pages and drops them from the index. Every day without fixes is another day losing rankings to competitors. The recovery sequence is well-defined -- but must be executed correctly and in the right order.
Every URL that changed needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. Without it, Google drops those pages from the index and backlinks lose their value. The most common and most damaging migration failure.
After a domain migration, every canonical must point to the new domain. If canonicals still reference the old domain, Google treats the old site as primary.
Development environments block crawlers. If Disallow: / makes it to production, Google cannot crawl the new site at all -- causing complete indexing failure overnight.
A migration changes URLs but internal links still point to old structures. A sitemap listing old URLs sends crawlers to 404 pages, wasting crawl budget and delaying re-indexation.
Export all 404 errors from Google Search Console Coverage report. Every URL returning a 404 that was previously indexed is a ranking loss in progress.
Map every 404 URL to its correct new equivalent and implement 301 redirects. No chain redirects. No 302s. Verify each returns 301 and reaches the correct destination.
Check canonical tags on every page to confirm they point to the new domain. Fix all internal links still pointing to old URLs.
Submit updated sitemap.xml listing only new URLs. Request indexing for the homepage and top pages. Monitor Coverage report for improvement.
With all technical fixes correctly implemented, most sites recover significant rankings within 4-12 weeks. Faster implementation means faster recovery.
Yes. Rankings can be recovered even months after a migration, though the timeline extends. The recovery process is the same -- fix redirects, canonicals, internal links, submit updated sitemap.
Open Google Search Console Coverage report and export all 404 errors. Every URL returning a 404 that was previously indexed needs a 301 redirect immediately.
Check yoursite.com/robots.txt for Disallow: / directives. If present, remove them immediately and reload your web server. Check this before anything else if traffic dropped to near zero overnight.
Free website and AI visibility audit -- prioritized action plan within 1-2 business days. No commitment required.