Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?

[oline123]

Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company.

They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content.

Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session.

Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo).

They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this.

My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions.

These are the things we've identified:

1. All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it.

2. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s.

3. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years.

4. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301.

5. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema.

6. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now.

Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.

[Adnan124]

Facing the same issue. Is there any tutorial or guide that can solve this issue.

[dev.faizan1]

this is starange everyone face same issue like me. does anyone out there have a step by step guide?

[nkobug]

This is strange everyone is facing this problem like me anyone find out the guide yet?

[freakinghoodlum]

Does anyone out there have a step by step guide on this?

[UsmanChaudhry]

I have the same que which I asked the main queue. I have a website on black german shepherd  and facing the same issue.

[unas143211]

I have the same question which is asked in the main question.. I have e-commerce website name is best hoverboard and facing the same problem.

[miansws]

Hi, I am also facing a similar issue. Do let me know as well if you find out any helpful guide.