Q: Our international traffic dropped after a domain move but US was fine — what happened?
Classic, and it always points one direction.
Short answer: your hreflang tags still reference the old domain.
Long answer: a multi-region site moved domains, redirected everything, and US/English recovered normally. But UK, DE, and FR traffic stayed down ~25%. The hreflang annotations (which tell Google which language/region version to show) still listed old-domain URLs. Google saw broken cross-references and partly ignored the cluster, so it served the wrong regional version.
We updated every hreflang URL to the new domain and confirmed they were reciprocal. Regional traffic recovered over 5 weeks.
Next step: if only some countries dropped after a move, audit hreflang first — those tags are easy to forget and they reference absolute URLs.
Migration Helpdesk
@MigrationHelpdesk
Q: Our international traffic dropped after a domain move but US was fine — what happened?
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