How Long Should An SEO Migration Take? [Study]

On average, it took 523 days for Domain B to show the same level of organic traffic as Domain A.
The shortest times recorded were 19, 22, 23, and 33 days.
17% of domain migrations in the sample didn’t see organic traffic return to the same levels after 1,000 days. This is a significant improvement versus the 42% from the previous study.
We classified three migrations as “In progress” as they were less than two years old, and traffic was returning slowly.
We classified 25 migrations (2.8%) as “Inconclusive” as Domain B traffic had hit the levels of Domain A, but wasn’t stable.

From the original data set, a number of domains dropped and are now redirected to domain squatters/private domain sellers.

As these aren’t “genuine” domain migrations, and the new domain was never intended to maintain the same keywords and traffic, these have been discounted and not included in the data.

Why Do Migration Results Differ?

No two websites are the same, and there are several variables in a website migration we can control – and several we can’t.

The discourse around migrations in the SEO industry has really not changed for a number of years, with basic best practices being established and then layering the basics with situation-dependent needs to mitigate risks.

Google rebuilds its index on a page-by-page basis, so opening up new crawl paths and URLs ahead of time could speed up the initial Discover and Crawl phases.

From experience, launching the new domain and URL structure 24-48 hours ahead of performing the migration, i.e. implementing redirects, can help speed up the process as Google has already began to crawl and start processing the new URL paths in the majority of cases. This coupled with the change of address tool in Google Search Console can smooth a lot of early migration lag.

Backlink Profiles & Migrations

While crowd-sourcing domains for this study, I also asked the community why there are “time lags” in migrations.

Natalia Witczyk proposed the idea that it’s related to backlink profiles and how long it takes Google to process profile transference:

From my experience, for the rankings and traffic to be back to normal levels, the backlink profile has to be recrawled and the redirects have to be reflected.

That takes close to no time if the backlink profile is non-existent, so the return to normal traffic levels happens fast. If the backlink profile is extensive, there’s more to recrawl and that would take Google more time.

This prompted me to look at the total number of referring domains each domain had, and there is some correlation to this being the case, but with a large number of outliers – likely due to how the migration was carried out.

For more information and best practices on website migrations, I’d recommend reading the below articles:

More Resources:

Featured Image: ParinPix/Shutterstock