Google's John Mueller says some domain moves take longer than four months to settle

Search Engine Roundtable published the story on October 13, 2026, under the headline "Google Search Showing Sites Old Domain Fourth Months After Domain Move?" Search Engine Journal reported John Mueller's answer under the headline "Google Says Why Site Migrations Can Exceed 4 Months." The question came from a site owner on Reddit whose domain move looked finished and then partly came undone. If you have ever thought about renaming your business, merging two websites or moving to a better web address, this case shows how long Google can take to fully let go of the old one.

A domain move that looked finished came undone four months later

According to Search Engine Journal, the site owner changed their website's name and domain at the start of 2026 so the site could cover one additional topic. They wrote on Reddit that they "did all the redirects, Change of Address, and internal name changes right away," and that traffic recovered around the start of April. Everything was indexed on the new domain, which was getting around 5,000 impressions per day.

Then, in their words, "Four months later, Google suddenly reverted everything back to the old domain." They said more than 5,000 pages on the new domain were moved to the "Crawled, Not Currently Index" status in Search Console, and the new domain dropped to 20 impressions per week. Meanwhile, the old domain's Search Console showed the impressions and clicks again.

One detail matters a great deal for a business owner. People who clicked the old domain in Google were still redirected to the same page on the new domain, so the visits kept arriving. The site owner asked whether they even needed to fix it, since the clicks were still landing on the right site.

John Mueller's advice: set up the change of address twice

John Mueller of Google replied on the thread, as Search Engine Journal reported. He offered to look at the domains privately and then said: "Sometimes things just take a particularly long time to be fully processed."

He added one concrete step: "One thing which we noticed (and adjusted in the documentation a while back) that can help is to make sure that you have change of address set up in search console for both www and non-www, so that it can fully migrate the domain."

Think of it like mail forwarding at the post office. If your building receives mail under two slightly different addresses and you file forwarding for only one of them, some letters keep going to the old place. Google treats the www and non-www versions of your domain as separate addresses, and Mueller's point is that both need the forwarding order. Search Engine Journal adds that outside links pointing to one version or the other could be part of why Google picked the old domain as the main one.

Google's own documentation says to expect weeks, and sometimes much longer

Google's Search Central guide on site moves sets the expectations plainly. It says that for medium-sized websites, it can take a few weeks or more for Google to gradually start showing the new URLs instead of the old ones, and for larger sites even longer. It says the speed depends largely on the number of URLs and your server speed.

The same guide explains why a move can drag. Google's documentation says that to consider a site move complete, Googlebot will have to visit every URL on your old and new site at least once. It adds that there are no fixed crawl frequencies and that the move takes place on a per-URL basis. In other words, a site can look moved on most pages while some old addresses are still waiting for a visit.

The guide also tells site owners to verify both the old and new sites in Search Console, and to verify all variants, for example www.example.com and example.com, plus the HTTPS and HTTP versions if you use HTTPS. That lines up with Mueller's www and non-www advice.

Small technical details that can pull Google back to the old domain

Search Engine Journal pointed out that the Reddit post left out several details, and listed the usual suspects in a migration that goes wrong:

• Internal links written as full addresses with the old domain, hiding in the menu, the footer or inside page text. The publication suggests crawling the old domain with Screaming Frog before the move to find them.
• How the redirect was set up. A redirect done at the domain registrar might not keep the page paths, and HTTPS forwarding may fail if the old domain has no SSL certificate.
• Chained redirects, where one redirect leads to another.
• Redirects that break when the site's navigation structure changes during the move.
• An XML sitemap that still lists the old domain, which could send conflicting signals about which address is the real one.

Google's guide covers the same ground from its side. It recommends server-side permanent redirects from old URLs to new ones, a self-referencing canonical tag on each new URL, updating internal links to the new addresses, and a sitemap containing the new URLs. It also says 301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank.

PDFs deserve a separate check. Google's migration guide says to transfer downloads such as PDF documents because they may already get traffic from Google Search or links. Separately, on October 13, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable summarized a Search Off the Record podcast with Google's Martin Splitt and John Mueller. His summary says Google recrawls PDFs much less frequently than HTML pages. If your price list, menu or intake forms are PDFs, they are among the files Google revisits less often.

Why this matters for a clinic, a trades company or a store

Most business owners never move a domain on purpose. They do it when they rebrand, add a partner to the firm's name, merge two locations into one website, or buy a cleaner web address. This story shows that the move is not finished when the new site goes live, and may not be finished when traffic recovers either.

The practical lesson from this case is simple. Keep the old domain registered and its redirects working long after the move, because Google may keep sending people to it. In the Reddit case, the redirects are what kept visitors arriving while Search Console showed the new domain collapsing.

Google's guide also says to change one thing at a time. If you plan a new domain, a new website platform and a new design, Google's documentation says to do them one after the other, not all at once. It also suggests timing a move for a quieter period if your traffic is seasonal.

What Google has not explained about this case

The other side: Search Engine Journal's headline says Google explained why migrations can exceed four months, but the public reply from Mueller does not give a specific cause. He said some moves take a particularly long time and offered one setting that can help. He asked for the domains in a private message, and no diagnosis of this site has been published. It is also not known whether the site owner had missed the www or non-www change of address, or any of the other details Search Engine Journal listed. And the four-month figure comes from one site owner's experience, not from a Google timeline. Google's own guide promises no fixed duration.

Bottom line

What surfaced is a reminder from Google's John Mueller that a domain move can take far longer than owners expect, and one clear step: set up the Search Console change of address for both the www and non-www versions. If a move is in your plans, treat it as a project that runs for months, keep the old domain and its redirects alive, and check your internal links, sitemap and PDFs before and after.

If you changed your business name tomorrow, do you know every version of your web address that Google has on file?