Keep migration redirects in place long term and judge a move in Search Console, not with site: queries

Google keeps the source of a redirect as an alternate name and may still show old URLs to people who search for the old domain or brand; its redirect guide calls this normal and says it fades over time. Removing redirects early breaks those visits and the consolidation of signals. Google's site move guide says to keep redirects generally at least one year so it can transfer all signals, and that small to medium sites take a few weeks for most pages to move. Said at Search Central Live: a site move takes one to three months on average and up to about a year, because Google's slowest signal is recalculated only about once a year (a partly uncertain passage of the recording). Asked how to plan a migration that does not leave many URLs unindexed, a Google panelist said sitemaps are not the main tool: decide first what matters from the business's perspective, for example whether to consolidate languages; listing the new URLs in a sitemap cannot hurt.

Map every old URL to its final new URL in one hop (DEV-CAN-10), keep the redirects for at least a year and ideally indefinitely, use Search Console's Change of address tool for domain moves, submit the new sitemaps, update internal links to the new URLs so pages do not rely on redirects alone, and follow the new property's indexing and traffic against a pre-migration baseline.

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