Google change of address tool from .co.uk to .com resulted in huge derank

Question

December 2020 I moved a site from a .co.uk to a .com. No other changes, simple 301 redirect and use of the tool in google webmaster tools. The site had existed since 2006 and was the de facto site in the vertical, meaning I had plenty of P1s on google for medium tail keywords.

Now, 2.5 months later I am still hugely deranked for 10,000s of key words, and as a result I've dropped 40% of my traffic.

I was wondering whether anyone had any advice. Obviously this is a huge issue for me as it's my livelihood I've built up over 15 years of hard work. I followed googles direction perfectly (my background is actually web dev and SEO) and it's still deranked me.

I'm not sure the linking policy here, but the site is tyrereviews dot com, it used to be tyrereviews dot couk, and for example we used to rank 1 or 2 for the search "michelin primacy 4" in google UK however we are now page 2.

The new .com domain is targeted properly to the UK in webmaster tools too.

This is the same for many many medium tail keywords.

Answer 1

Sorry for your (traffic) loss. That is quite dramatic.

For what it is worth, I am getting your site as a result when I do this search on Google .com and co.uk. #1 and #4 respectively.

This could be a problem with language and country targeting. Tires, not tyres, in North America. But since you are showing up when I search, this sounds more like an issue of Google reindexing content. I have seen this with branded searches also when companies migrate content to a new domain.

I don't know if you are targeting North America at all, did you set country targeting in Google Search Console? That could be having some impact also.