Has Anyone Moved An Entire Site This Year?

Only the domain name will change

[RedBar]

It's been a couple of years or so ince I last moved an entire site to a new domain name. The last time I did one Google had much done within two weeks and 99% in four weeks, very efficient all round.

There would be no changes to the site whatsoever other than it's new branding name, 301s would be in place for all urls. It's a site of 5K in pages and 20K images.

I am "assuming" that things ought to transfer as in the past however this year I have seen a noticeable change in G's attitude / lethargy towards indexing and ranking new sites, new pages on existing sites I have not experienced any issues, completely new sites have been almost pointless.

Any thoughts or 2022 experiences?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google will still accept the move but lethargy is real.

- If you get little traffic from sources other than search Google acts like it is arthritic.
- If you get lots of traffic from sources other than search Google moves quickly to finish the ranking process for all pages..

Oddly, Google has been getting slower since the caffeine update years ago. It needs another dose!

[engine]

Moving to new servers was no problem.

Crawling and index updating has definitely become slower.

[Dimitri]

Moving to new servers was no problem.

Moving to a new server, and moving to a new domain name, are totally different things.

Moving to a new server should have no impact at all.

Moving to a new domain name requires a whole re-indexing , a whole re-calculation of the ranking stuff.

At the end, the new domain, should have the same performances as the old one. (Not better, not worse).

A few years ago, I would have said, that 2 weeks was the time for Google to catch up the change. Today, I would say, at least a month.

It's better to do this during a period where the business has the less activity.

To make the transition smoother, but a lot longer, is to keep the content on both domain names , and use the canonical tag to select the new domain. Then, when you observe that all the traffic is directly going to the new domain, you can set up the 301 redirects. However, it can take months, and might not be convenient to keep up the content on both domains, depending of your infrastructure.

[RedBar]

@Dimitri

Wow! I have to say that is what I definitely will not be doing and have not done with successful moves in the past.

Quite simply I shall upload the site to the new name, check all is weIl and then 301 every url immediately.

I really do not understand what you mean by this:

when you observe that all the traffic is directly going to the new domain, you can set up the 301 redirects.

New sites are not getting traffic immediately these days, it is taking months.

Have I misunderstood what you are suggesting?