I've lost 90% of traffic after domain migration and it still has not recovered after 5 months

- Redirected matching every URL 1:1

- Updated every internal link

- Requested the change of address in GSC

- Monitoring the logs on both new and old domains. Nothing strange, every request on the old domain redirects to the new one, and every request on the new domain requests 200 or 304.

- No errors in GSC. All pages on the old domain appear as "Redirect" and all pages on the new domain appear as "Crawled and Indexed"

- Uploaded the old sitemap with the old URLs on the old domain for crawling's sake.

- I'm using Cloudflare on both domains (done the redirects with Cloudflare's page rules)

- Both domains have the exact same contact details and server IP.



Other important insights:

- Strangely, the website is ranking pretty well with the new domain on a couple of pages while the rest of the pages that used to rank before domain migration are vanished from SERP (don't receive a single impression, like they are not even ranking in the first 200). How is possible to have like 7-8 pages taking the first position in Google for some solid keywords with decent competition while the other 500 pages (some with almost no competition and better content than the ranking pages) haven't appeared in SERP not once during these 5 months? The old domain doesn't receive any single traffic though, that's a good sign, right?

- The crawling rate on the old domain is deadly slow. Google keeps visiting the category pages on the old domain over and over again. Sometimes Google crawls a category URL 15-20 times in a single day while the inner pages are rarely crawled.

- The crawling rate on the new domain is decent, however, I noticed Google crawls more aggressively the pages that rank (like 15-20 times a single day). Is this normal?



What have I done wrong? I don't get why the traffic has still been not recovered after 4-5 months.



My guesses are:

- Google released several updates after I changed the domain name. Though the website wasn't impacted by either of them (the website maintained the exact traffic and ranking pages through every update), it could slow down the process or even break it.

- The migration is still processing. I have seen people claiming they have recovered after 6 to 8 months and some even after 1 year. But I also saw people claiming the traffic is usually recovered after 1 month. What are your thoughts on this?

- Someone did something very nasty while I changed the domain name (like black SEO or something like that) that I couldn't find and killed the website?



This is it. I'm done, hopeless and clueless. I asked dozens of people about this but no one could figure out what is going wrong. Everything seems to be done perfectly.



If someone is willing to take a deeper look I'd highly appreciate it. I can provide the website details in private along with GSC reports and Cloudflare access to check the server logs.

 

It's possible that your domain migration has not yet been fully processed by Google, which could explain why you're seeing slow or no recovery in traffic. It's important to remember that Google crawls and processes the web continuously, but it can take some time for all of your pages to be re-indexed and for your search rankings to be updated. In general, it's not uncommon for it to take several months for a domain migration to be fully processed by Google.

It's also worth considering the potential impact of any recent Google algorithm updates on your website's traffic. If your website was not impacted by these updates, it's unlikely that they are the cause of your traffic loss.

As for the pages on your new domain that are ranking well, it's possible that these pages have high-quality content and are well-optimized for search, which is helping them rank well in the search results. It's also possible that Google is still in the process of re-indexing and updating the search rankings for the rest of your pages, and that they will eventually catch up.

In terms of the slow crawling rate on your old domain and the aggressive crawling of your new domain's ranking pages, these could be normal behaviors for Google's crawlers. It's possible that Google is prioritizing the crawling of your ranking pages on the new domain in order to update their search rankings more quickly.

It's difficult to say exactly what might be causing your traffic loss without more information, but it's possible that it's simply a matter of time for Google to fully process your domain migration and update your search rankings. It might also be helpful to double-check that all of your pages have been properly redirected and that your internal links are all up to date. It's also a good idea to monitor your website's performance in search and make any necessary optimizations to improve your search rankings.