I have a huge indexation problem for my website fornitura-lucegas.com since I redirected it on May 2020: only 5 pages are indexed whereas it is a 16k pages website (therefore, my traffic dropped by 98%), and when I look KW by KW, my pages are nowhere to be seen, including if I go to page 8+.
Before I redirected the domain, I had an old website, csttaranto.it, that I obtained in October 2019 and that I put live with my content (again, 16k pages). It had a decent growth and a decent indexation rate (80%) until May 2020, but for a branding matter I chose to redirect the entire website towards my current new domain name fornitura-lucegas.com (that I created for the occasion, so there wasn't any content on it). And from this date, my website didn't regain its indexation.
I honestly think I did all the things "right":
- It was a 1:1 migration, I created the exact same pages in my new domain (I also kept the exact same design and URL architecture) and did 301 redirects
- I updated the robots.txt and the sitemap in the new domain, with the new URLs
- When I do a crawl of the old website's URLs with Screaming Frog, there are all well redirected to the respective URLs in fornitura-lucegas.com, and when I crawl fornitura-lucegas.com, there isn't any error, and the crawler manages to go through every page without problem, and only see 200 (no 3XX or 4XX)
- I submitted the old sitemap once I did the redirection, so Google can see that they were all redirected, and I submitted fornitura-lucegas.com's sitemap so Google can see the new ones as well
What's really really weird is that:
- In Bing, Yahoo and Qwant, my new website is indexed, and mostly appears in first page, or at least in first 15 organic positions
- The weirdest thing is that in the GSC of the new website, coverage report, it says that the website has its 16k pages valid and indexed, whereas they are not! I tried submitted 10 pages one by one to see if it changes anything, but nothing. And the individual report still says "This page is indexed" whereas it is not.
- In the sitemap section, even though Google reads my sitemap, it displayes "0 URLs discovered", but the sitemap and the sub-sitemap are hit by Google with 200 status code (when I look at the logs)
- When I look at the Coverage report > Valid pages (so the 16k), it says "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap", and when I look for specific detail one by one, either there are not any referring page, either the referring page is the old domain's previous respective page, which seems to mean that Google knows my new pages only by re-crawling the old domain URLs, and doesn't follow my internal linking (which seems to work if I look at the Screaming Frog report, and most of all knowing that Bing indexes the pages)
- I did good netlinking campaigns since the redirection and got like 70 new referring domains
- I don't have any manual action
- I ran a test in parallel with 2 another new websites (with new domain name, among which utenze-lucegas.it), with 8k pages that speak about the same topic as my main website (but with original content of course) to see if it was a matter of content/authority. Even though the content is less "rich", the 2 websites' 8k pages are indexed in Google. It's also not an authority issue, because my main website has more than 150 backlinks whereas the 2 "test" website only less than 10.
I'm really hopeless and clueless, I can't find any lead or any explanation. Considering the indexation in Bing/Qwant/Yahoo and the weird things I see in GSC (coverage, sitemap, referring pages), I thing there is something Google doesn't accept, or perhaps is blocked by something.
Thanks a lot for your help, Paul