Rankings gone after the relaunch: finding the technical cause

The relaunch was ten days ago. The home page holds its position, but the queries that used to land on subpages sit near zero impressions in Search Console, and nobody on the project can say whether that is down to the redirects, to a noindex carried over from the test system, or simply to Google re-evaluating. Every day of guessing costs revenue. What really gets expensive, though, is switching off the old domain before anyone has secured its indexed inventory.

How to go about it in JMX

1. Open the Migration view and enter the old and the new domain. Collect the old inventory from several sources at once: crawl, sitemap, Search Console, site: query, Wayback Machine. They contradict each other on purpose — the crawl finds what was linked, the archive also finds URLs deleted years ago that still carry backlinks.
2. Start the comparison. Every old address gets one of eleven verdicts: from “OK” through Temporary redirect, Redirect chain, Redirect loop and “Not redirected” to “Lost” (404/410), “Target not indexable” and “Redirected to home page”. Add the Search Console click data and the list sorts by risk: severity of the finding times click volume of the old URL.
3. The Technical tab, the technical sign-off on one page: crawler access, robots.txt, sitemaps, indexability, redirects, load times, language codes and security headers. A staging robots.txt dragged along at go-live shows up here in the first minute.
4. Crawl the new domain and go through the HTML validation under Issues. An invalid element in the head closes it early; the canonical, hreflang and robots that follow end up in the body, where Google does not read them. The rule names the first such element with its line number.
5. Write the redirect file from the matches, as .htaccess, nginx .conf or web.config. You choose the status code and the confidence threshold beforehand; everything below the default of 90 % comes along commented out instead of disappearing.
6. After the repair, run the Recheck. It fetches exactly the changed addresses at click depth zero and puts status and findings before against now, without a second full crawl. A button then submits the new targets to IndexNow.

What to watch out for

The verdict “Not redirected” is regularly misread. In a migration, an old URL that still answers 200 means the switch has not taken effect at that point. If the same domain stands on both sides, though — because you are rechecking rather than migrating — that very same answer is the desired result and is recorded as “Still reachable”. The host is compared character for character, because beispiel.at to www.beispiel.at is a real move.

JMX does not answer why a ranking fell. It checks whether the addresses Google knew still arrive. If the migration score is high and the clicks stay away anyway, the cause lies in the content, in the competition or in an update, and there is no measurement for that here — but there is Search insights with “Gained / Lost” against the preceding period of equal length. The sources have their gaps: Search Console delivers what had impressions in the last 90 days, indexed pages with no impressions at all are missing there, and the archive inventory is capped at 50,000 URLs.

That leaves time. Google does not take up new URLs on the day of the switch; following up pays two to four weeks later via the URL inspection in Search Console. IndexNow speeds up Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver, not Google — the success message says so too.

Secure the old domain’s inventory while it still answers: after that the only source left is the archive, and the archive knows only what it happened to visit.