Mueller: set change of address for www and non-www

A site owner moved domains at the start of 2026, did the redirects and a Change of Address, and saw traffic recover by April. Four months later Google began showing the old domain again. John Mueller replied that moves can take a long time and named one setting that may help.

We could not open the Reddit thread, which returned an error to our fetch. The facts of the case and Mueller’s wording are as Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal quote them, both on 13 October 2026.

What happened to the site?#

Per Search Engine Journal’s quote of the thread, the owner changed the name and domain to cover one more topic. They did the redirects, the Change of Address and the internal name changes right away, and traffic recovered around the start of April. The new domain then earned about 5,000 impressions a day.

Four months later, the owner wrote, Google reverted everything to the old domain. More than 5,000 pages of the new domain moved to Crawled, currently not indexed, and the new domain now gets 20 impressions a week. The old domain’s Search Console property shows everything again, and a result under the old domain redirects to the same post on the new one.

What did Mueller say?#

Search Engine Journal quotes Mueller’s reply in full: “Happy to take a look if you want to DM me the domains. Sometimes things just take a particularly long time to be fully processed.” He added that Google noticed one thing, and adjusted the documentation a while back, that can help: make sure Change of Address is set up in Search Console for both www and non-www, so that it can fully migrate the domain.

Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz splits the reply into the same two points. He also wrote that he could not imagine the www setting is the cause, and he does not know all the details beyond the thread.

What does Google’s guide say?#

We fetched Google’s Change of Address help page and it matches Mueller’s pointer. It says the tool does not move subdomains below the domain you specify, www included, and tells site owners moving to another domain to use it for every variant of the old domain, even variants they are not actively using. It also asks that all of those variants be verified in Search Console.

The same page says the move notification shows for 180 days, that redirects should stay for at least that long, and that Google prefers the new site as canonical during that period. It does not tell you how to resolve a case like this one, and Mueller did not claim it would.

How long can a site move take?#

Mueller gave no figure. “Four months or more” is Search Engine Journal’s reading of his reply, not his number. For a wider range, our report on how long Google takes to crawl, index and update results covers the typical and slowest site move times shown at Search Central Live, as a recap reported them.

Search Engine Roundtable also embeds a post by Marie Haynes dated 13 October 2026. She says she sees the same pattern of migrations gone wrong, with the pages sitting in Crawled, currently not indexed, and offers a theory that a move triggers a new quality assessment. That is her opinion, not something Google confirmed.

What should you check?#

Start with the setting Mueller named. In Search Console, confirm that every variant of the old domain, www and non-www, is a verified property with its own Change of Address. Then check that each old URL reaches its new counterpart in one hop with the redirect chain analyzer, and plan the mapping with the redirect map builder. Both tools are our suggestion, not Mueller’s.

Search Engine Journal also lists items the asker did not mention: stray absolute links to the old domain, redirect type, chained redirects and an out-of-date sitemap. Those are the outlet’s checklist and not Google’s. Our indexing hub and the Search Console hub cover the reports you will use to watch the move.