Client
Large international B2B brand (name on request)
Sector
Services
Headline result
A de-indexed site diagnosed, stabilised and brought back
The challenge
A large international B2B brand had rebranded and moved to a new domain, and by the end of the year it had gone badly wrong. Google had reverted many of the migration signals: the new site was dropping out of the index while the old domain kept surfacing in its place, and organic traffic had fallen sharply.
The migration itself had already been carried out, by the client’s own team and their existing agency, before we were involved. We were brought in afterwards, once it had gone wrong, as a senior independent view. Plenty of effort had already gone in, but the site still wasn’t stabilising, and they needed someone to work out what was actually happening and set a clear order of priorities to fix it.
The work
We ran a detailed investigation across both the old and new domains, reviewing the technical signals, the migration setup and the work already completed, retracing the key steps and validating what had actually gone live.
The picture wasn’t a single fault but several technical inconsistencies compounding on one another. The two that mattered most: an old-domain sitemap that redirected instead of staying live, so Google couldn’t properly process the migration, and real uncertainty over whether crawl access was being restricted at the firewall.
We set it all out as a tiered plan, the few high-impact priorities first, then the supporting fixes, so everyone knew exactly what to tackle and in what order. Throughout, we were careful to credit the thorough work already done and to work alongside the client’s team and their agency rather than over the top of them
The results
With the priorities clear and everyone finally working to one plan, the migration signals began to stabilise. Through the first months of the year the new domain came back into Google’s index and organic traffic recovered steadily, climbing to around 400 clicks a day by late April, resolving an issue that had been stuck for months. It was never going to be one silver bullet, and it wasn’t any single team’s win. Several fixes landed together, which is how these things actually get solved. Our part was the senior, independent diagnosis and the prioritised plan that got everyone moving the same way.
