Google's Mueller says domain migrations can take over four months

Key points

• Mueller said some domain changes take an unusually long time to fully process and offered to review affected domains.
• He recommended setting a change of address in Search Console for both www and non-www versions of the domain.
• A Reddit site owner saw Google revert search visibility to the old domain four months after a successful migration.
• Stray absolute URLs to the old domain and chained redirects can complicate migrations, so crawl the site before moving.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams migrating domains should set change of address for www and non-www, audit internal links, and keep sitemaps on the new domain to avoid canonical conflicts.