By Elena Vasquez

A hobby site that followed every migration rule correctly saw 98% of its URLs classified as "not indexed" by Google — and search quality consultant Marie Haynes thinks she knows why. Her theory: a site migration triggers a fresh quality review from Google, and Google's quality standards have grown stricter.

Haynes, writing on Search Engine Journal, is explicit that the theory remains unproven. "Please know that this theory is not something I can prove at this point," she wrote. "I am writing this blog post to generate discussion."

What happened to the site in question?

The site had performed well historically and had entered a slow decline over the past year. Its owner executed the migration by the book: change of address filed in Google Search Console, redirects carefully mapped, internal links updated, crawl access verified, and a sitemap generated for the new domain.

The Page Indexing Report still showed 98% of URLs as not indexed. The picture was worse on inspection. Even the 33 pages Google reported as indexed were not. Every page carried the status "crawled – currently not indexed."

That distinction matters. Google found the pages without difficulty. It crawled them and chose not to index them. A live test in Google Search Console confirmed each page was available for indexing — but only if certain conditions were met.

What does Google say causes this?

Google's documentation lists three reasons a valid page might not be indexed: a manual action, duplication of another page, or insufficient page quality. Haynes ruled out the first two. Google recognized the new domain as the canonical version, and the old pages redirected correctly.

That leaves quality. In her review, Haynes found the site well written and thorough, but she noted "there was very little original value on any page compared to what already exists on other sites on the web." She called it commodity content — material essentially identical to what other sites publish.

Google recently updated its helpful content documentation on "main content" (the part of a page that fulfills the searcher's need). The update emphasizes four factors: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy. Google defines originality as "the extent to which the content offers unique, original information or perspectives that aren't already available on other websites."

Why did the old domain survive?

The obvious question: why did the same content pass quality checks before the migration? Haynes argues that applying these standards across the entire web would devastate most sites, and she speculates a future core update could do exactly that. Her theory holds that the migration itself triggered a stricter assessment, and the site's unoriginal content failed it.

What should marketers do?

Haynes recommends a specific sequence for sites stuck after migration:

• Rule out technical causes first: correct redirects, a recorded change of address in Google Search Console, and a Live Test to confirm Google can render the pages.
• Factor in time, since migrations can take months to process — though in her case study, four months passed and only the homepage gained indexing.
• If quality is the cause, publish a small number of genuinely original articles rather than more commodity content.
• Consider a fresh domain with new content as a last resort, since "there is no technical SEO fix for many of these sites that are struggling to get their new domain indexed."

One open question remains. Haynes does not know whether Google judges the value of individual new pages or whether a site-wide quality score, depressed by unoriginal content, will block indexing regardless. For brands planning a domain move, the implication is blunt: audit content originality before the migration, not after.