Google Search Console After a Migration: What to Watch for Six Weeks

The migration shipped, the redirects resolve, the new site looks right. For the next six weeks, Search Console is the instrument panel that tells you whether the move actually worked, if you know which dials to read and what normal looks like on each. This is the monitoring routine, in the order that catches problems fastest.

Launch day: three checks before anything else#

Submit the new sitemap. Sitemaps report → add the new sitemap URL. If the domain did not change, the property is the same one; if it did, verify the new property first and use the Change of Address tool.

Inspect your top five URLs. URL Inspection on your most valuable pages → Request Indexing. This does not "boost" anything; it shortcuts the queue so your most important pages get re-evaluated in days rather than weeks.

Confirm nothing is blocked. Load robots.txt in a browser and check for a stray Disallow: /. View source on the homepage and search for noindex. Sixty seconds, and it rules out the only failure mode that is genuinely catastrophic.

The Page Indexing report, your early-warning system#

Indexing → Pages. This is the report to open every day or two for the first fortnight.

Normal during the transition:

• "Page with redirect" counts rising, that is your old URLs being recognised as moved. This number growing is the migration working.
• "Crawled – currently not indexed" wobbling as Google re-evaluates.
• Indexed count dipping slightly, then recovering as new URLs replace old ones.

Not normal, act the day you see it:

• "Not found (404)" climbing. Each one is an old URL with no redirect. Open the list, find the pattern (a blog path structure someone forgot, an image directory, a trailing-slash variant), add the missing redirects.
• "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" on real pages. A staging setting leaked to production. Fix immediately.
• "Redirect error". Usually a chain or a loop. Flatten it.

The 404 list deserves an actual read, not a count-check: the URLs tell you which category of redirect got missed, and one pattern usually explains most of the list.

The Performance report, read it by page, not in total#

Site-wide totals are where migration damage hides. One page losing 60% of its clicks disappears inside a hundred stable ones.

Instead: Performance → Pages tab → compare date ranges (last 28 days vs the equivalent pre-migration window from the export you took before launch, you did take one). Sort by click delta. What you will typically see:

• Most pages within noise range of their old numbers.
• A short tail of pages down noticeably, investigate these individually. Check: does the old URL 301 to the right place? Did the title or H1 change? Did the content?
• Occasionally a page up, faster platform, cleaner markup. Enjoy it quietly.

Check the Queries tab for your revenue keywords specifically. A position wobble of 2–4 spots in weeks one to three is settling. A keyword that vanished entirely is a page problem, find which page held it.

Weeks one and two: expect turbulence, verify plumbing#

Rankings fluctuate; do not react to daily movement. Your job in this phase is plumbing, not positions: 404 report clean, redirects resolving, sitemap processed ("Success" status), top pages indexed when inspected.

Re-crawl your old URL list once more about a week in (any crawler, in list mode, against the pre-migration inventory). Everything should return 301 → 200. This catches the redirect that worked on launch night and broke in Tuesday's deploy.

Weeks three to six: the verdict forms#

By week three or four the trend line means something. Clicks and impressions should be converging on the old baseline, flat is a pass, a recovering dip is a pass in progress.

When to stop worrying: Search Console has been boring for two consecutive weeks, 404s flat near zero, performance within noise of baseline, indexing stable. Boring is the goal state.

When to dig in: the decline is still deepening at week four, or specific high-value pages have not recovered. The cause is nearly always findable, an unmapped URL cluster, a soft-404 pattern from lazy redirects, a template accidentally thinning content, and nearly always fixable. Redirects added late still work; they just restart the clock for those pages.

The short version#

Day one: sitemap, inspect top pages, check robots and noindex. Daily-ish: Page Indexing report, acting on any 404 growth. Weekly: Performance by page against your pre-migration export, revenue queries by name. Weeks 3–6: watch the trend, not the wobble. The migration is proven when Search Console gets boring, and if it refuses to get boring, the report that is misbehaving tells you exactly where to look.