Unproven theory blames stalled migrations on site quality

Marie Haynes, an SEO consultant who publishes on Google’s quality systems and ranking updates, has put forward a theory that a site migration triggers a fresh and stricter quality review from Google, and that this is why some correctly executed moves never get indexed. Haynes’s post at Search Engine Journal states up front that the theory is not something she can prove and that she published it to generate discussion. The evidence is one site: a hobby-topic blog that moved to a new domain and then had 98 percent of its URLs reported as not indexed.

By Haynes’s account the owner did the standard migration work. The Change of Address was submitted in Search Console, redirects were mapped, internal links updated, a sitemap generated for the new domain, and Googlebot could crawl the site. The Page Indexing report credited 33 URLs as indexed, and inspecting those 33 showed they were not. Every page came back as “crawled - currently not indexed”, so Googlebot had fetched them and declined to index them rather than failing to find them.

A live test in Search Console on several of those pages returned a conditional result: the page was available to be indexed, but only if certain conditions were met. Google’s list of those conditions has three items, and Haynes ruled out two. There was no manual action, and the duplication worry did not hold up, because Google had recognized the new URL as the canonical and the old URL was redirecting to it. The third condition is that page quality must be high enough to warrant indexing, which is where the theory comes from. Haynes’s own review found the writing thorough but the substance commodity, with little on any page that was not already available elsewhere. Google’s documentation on creating helpful content now asks for originality in a page’s main content, defined as “unique, original information or perspectives that aren’t already available on other websites.”

Elimination down a three-item list is not evidence, and the item left standing is the one nothing can test. Google publishes no quality score, so there is no check that confirms this diagnosis and none that refutes it, which is why a single case can support the theory without ever strengthening it.

The likelier explanation sits in Haynes’s own description of the site. It had performed well and was in a slow decline over the past year, before the move. If quality pressure was already suppressing the site, the migration did not trigger a new review so much as it threw away whatever indexing the old URLs had earned and forced Google to decide about each page from scratch. No new mechanism is needed for that.

Four months is the part worth taking seriously. Haynes notes that migrations take time to process and that waiting longer is sometimes the whole answer, and a domain move can keep moving long after it looks finished: Google re-indexed one old domain four months after a site move. Four months with only the homepage indexed is a different situation, and Haynes is right that something is wrong.

What she recommends if the diagnosis holds is expensive. Haynes suggests producing a small handful of genuinely original articles, which for many sites means a new business direction, or starting over on a new domain with new content. She also says she does not know whether Google would judge those new pages on their own merits or hold a site-level quality assessment against them. Committing to a third domain on the strength of an admittedly unprovable theory is the costliest possible response to a problem nobody has isolated yet.

What to do

• Inspect individual URLs instead of reading the Page Indexing report’s totals. The report credited 33 indexed URLs in this case, and inspection found none of them indexed.
• Confirm Google selected the new URL as the canonical, and that each old URL returns a 301 to its specific match rather than to the homepage.
• Record the Change of Address in Search Console, and do it for the www and non-www properties both.
• Treat “available to be indexed” in the live test as conditional. It means nothing is blocking the page, not that the page will be indexed.
• If the technical checks come back clean and the stall has run for months rather than weeks, test the quality theory cheaply before acting on it. Publish a few pages carrying information that is genuinely not elsewhere, and watch whether those specific URLs get indexed. That tests the question Haynes says she cannot answer, and it costs one content sprint instead of a domain.