I own and run a website in a niche business consulting field. The site is about 15 years old and relatively small (~150 pages). All content is unique, written by a human based on personal experience, with no any AI-generated content. The site is available in Russian and English.
The old domain has always ranked very well in Google for its niche. Indexing was also excellent: new pages were usually crawled, indexed, and appeared in SERPs quickly.
The old site used a .RU ccTLD. The goal was to move it to a .COM gTLD.
The migration started on December 17, 2025, more than 9 months ago. It was carefully implemented according to Google's official recommendations, but the migration appears to have stalled almost completely.
I can provide the old and new domains URLs if useful.
Current symptoms:
- The site still appears in Google SERPs primarily under the old .RU URLs, even though the site has physically been on the .COM domain for more than 9 months.
- Google continues to crawl the old URLs and detects changes made to the corresponding pages. For example, if I change a meta description, Google eventually reflects that change while still showing the old URL in SERPs.
- In GSC, most pages on the new .COM domain are “Crawled – currently not indexed.”
- Any completely new page published on the .COM domain gets crawled but ends up in the same “Crawled – currently not indexed” state and never reaches the SERPs.
- Googlebot actively crawls both domains. According to GSC crawl stats, the .COM domain currently receives roughly 3x more crawling than the old .RU domain.
- In actual Google SERPs, only the .COM homepage is indexed.
To rule out the obvious questions:
- This was a straightforward domain migration. The entire site was moved from .RU to .COM without changing the content or URL structure. Old and new URLs match 1:1.
- The technical migration has been checked countless times: direct page-to-page 301 redirects, correct canonicals/indexability, updated internal links, GSC Change of Address, etc. Technically everything appears correct.
- Around 60–70% of external backlinks that I could control have also been updated from the old domain to the new one.
- The site has remained actively maintained during these 9 months. New pages have been added and existing pages gradually improved, but without major changes to their topics or structure.
My main question:
Has anyone here experienced a similarly stalled Google domain migration where Google eventually started indexing the new domain and the migration successfully resumed or completed, even after many months?
I've found quite a few similar cases on Google forums and Reddit, so this doesn't seem unique. However, I haven't found a single documented case where this exact kind of prolonged migration stall eventually resolved on its own.
I've seen plenty of comments saying that Google migrations can take a very long time nowadays, but very little evidence of what actually happens afterward.
That's what concerns me: maybe I'm waiting for a migration to finish that simply isn't going to finish, and I should be considering a different strategy instead.
I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has experienced something similar, especially if your migration eventually recovered after a long period of being stuck.
Happy to provide additional details or answer any questions.
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