Is this a do-over of an older domain? Does the old domain still exist and have traffic? Is the new domain different in name only? Does the old domain redirect to equivalent pages/content on the new domain? Are these two domains similar? Identical?

I apologize for so many questions, but the data itself does not give much indication of what or why.

I often 404'd sites to new domains years ago and traffic to the new ones remained pretty much the same. A few months ago I transferred another one to a more suitable domain name; it seemed to work OK for a short while, then traffic died completely. In the end I transferred it back and within a day or so traffic was back to normal.

So: perhaps you did everything right (I certainly did) but the problem is at Google's end.

Excuse me. I gave too little information about it. my mistake

- only the domain name has changed
- the domain name is complete new - no wayback history
- all URLs have remained the same and forwarded via 301
- olddomain.com/shop/?product=bla&categorie=blubb -> newdomain.com/shop/?product=bla&categorie=blubb
- no redesign
- social media accounts changed to new
- it looks like Google is doing a complete re-evaluation

I have many URLS with 1 click - 1 impression - position 1 in the GSC
that cannot be traced in the search index. Does Google do user tests to evaluate the URLs?

The old domain is completely gone then, it no longer exists except in Google's caches? It does not redirect (301) to the new domain? I ask because I could not be certain from the comparison images.

1. yes
2. all urls redirect 301 to new domain

Sorry to hear this. This is exactly what happened to us the last couple years. In 2021 we tried redirecting our very old site to a brand new domain that was very similar to the old one, just shorter and better. We waited over 3 months and the rankings and traffic just wouldn't come back. So we switched back to the old domain and rankings and traffic came back in less than a week.

Fast forward to this year, we tried again thinking that that "new domain" was no longer new and would probably work better. Wrong, same result. So we switched back to old domain.

Everything with the redirect was triple checked and then checked again. We also used Google's "Change of Address" tool. It just wouldn't work.

In the Podcast at the bottom of this recent article they basically admit site move redirects don't work half the time, or they take way longer than any business can wait:

[seroundtable.com...]

Frustrating how you always get non-committal answers. Pretty vague.

One guy said waiting a year is the max but then they all admit few businesses can wait that long. When pressed for a shorter time limit answer they all dance around the question and over complicate it. Keeping things vague and mysterious. Masters of misinformation over there.

Anyway my theory is Google quietly made redirects, especially to brand new domains, not work anymore. Sure some people have success with it however I'm coming across more people who aren't having success with it. They may be manually approving or disapproving every redirect over there now in order to fight spam. Not sure.

All that being said we've had some mixed success redirects older sites to other older sites. Sites that have been up for multiple years now consolidating into another older site.

thank you for your post.

the old domain is still mine. but i can't go back to the old domain because of trademark rights :-((

so i must wait...

Sometimes, small details can confuse Google. If you still have the old domain's account in GSC it can help to be sure to remove the old sitemap submitted in GSC. Don't block Googlebot with robots.txt because then they may presume and use cached data because they are not receiving any 'gone' signals. If the domain has removed all content and hosts only a default index while the old URLs are redirected to the new domain, removing the old sitemap can reinforce that those are no longer relative to that domain. Also check that the new URLs do not have signals to the old domain such as canonical meta links referring to the old domain.

Sometimes the platform can contribute to these old signals. If the old and new domains are using WP for example, you would want to uninstall WP on the old domain. Again, don't prevent crawling so Google will know it is not there anymore.