After a domain move, redesign, or CMS switch, traffic dips are expected — the question is whether pages are re-entering the index on schedule or silently falling out. You can't answer that from analytics; you answer it from the index.

The verification plan

  1. Build the master list before judging anything. Export the old site's key URLs (or the redirect map's targets) and the new sitemap into one .txt — money pages first.
  2. Baseline check. Run the list through a bulk checker to verify indexing in bulk: per-URL indexed / not-indexed, thousands of URLs per task. This is day 0.
  3. Triage the non-indexed pile. The usual post-migration suspects: redirects pointing to the wrong targets, canonicals still referencing the old domain, noindex left over from staging, orphaned pages that lost their internal links in the redesign.
  4. Fix, resubmit, re-check. Correct the blockers, request recrawling of fixed URLs — the manual reindexing guide covers the options — and re-run the same list at day 14 and day 28.
  5. Report the trend. Percent of the master list indexed at day 0 → 14 → 28 is the single clearest migration-health metric you can put in front of a stakeholder.

The full pre- and post-launch sequence — redirects, canonicals, sitemaps, monitoring — is in the post-migration SEO checklist.

The rule of thumb

Don't debate whether the migration “worked” from ranking charts in week one. Verify the index first — rankings can't recover on pages Google hasn't re-admitted.

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