Strange SEO Case – Indexing and Ranking Behavior After Domain Changes

Hello everyone,

I'd like to share an unusual situation I encountered recently in an SEO project and get your thoughts on it.

Here's how it unfolded:
We had a website that was redirecting to a new website. However, the new domain name was not indexed for a long time. After a while, the original domain name was completely deleted, but the new domain name still did not appear in Google's index. We then redirected everything to another domain name, and this domain name finally started to get indexed and ranked correctly.

Here, we redirected from example.com to example.net. So, it redirected from com to net. And it got indexed. Our original website had very high traffic and authority, and its backlink profile was the best in the industry in terms of brand name and overall.

Everything seemed fine for a few months, until something strange happened. Suddenly, despite being offline for months, the deleted original domain name started ranking again. However, the site still returns a 404 error, meaning the site doesn't exist. As soon as it started appearing in the results, the domain name, which previously had a ranking, good or bad, completely lost its position for the same keywords.

This was a confusing experience, and I'm trying to understand the reason behind this behavior. My main questions are:

How can a deleted domain name with no live content suddenly start ranking again?

Why would Google shift all keyword rankings back to the old, inactive domain name?

Is there a way to stabilize rankings in such a situation?

I would like to hear your theories or, if anyone has seen a similar situation before, I would appreciate it if you could share it.

Additionally, I would like to mention that even if the original authoritative domain redirects, the traffic can never be recovered as it was before. The site's sector is a grey hat sector.

Thank you in advance for your opinions.

Seems Like Google’s cache and historical signals got tangled — it sometimes re-tests old domains with strong link equity. A clean reindex and consistent redirects usually help stabilize things.

tooeasymoney said:

Seems Like Google’s cache and historical signals got tangled — it sometimes re-tests old domains with strong link equity. A clean reindex and consistent redirects usually help stabilize things.

Click to expand...

unfortunately, i no longer have the old powerful domain. Therefore i cant even do any redirection, let alone consistent redirection. Do you have any suggestions in this situation?

The old domain is still being crawled because it has authority, historical signals and past click through data. If you do not own that domain anymore, there is unfortunately very little you can do about it.

The main mistake was panic redirecting for a third time, from the .com domain to the .net domain.

What seems to be happening now is this:

Site A still holds the original authority and historical data. When Site A redirects to Site C, Google transfer some of that authority and historical performance data to Site C. This can give Site C a ranking/authority boost.

However, if that redirect is later removed, Google may start treating Site A as the canonical source again. As a result, Site A can regain some of its rankings which were lended to site C, while Site C loses the ranking benefits it received from the redirect.

Over time, Google understand that Site A is no longer active. At that point, Site C may keep a small amount of value from the previous redirect and its new ranking data, (because of increase of clicks in that small time frame) but in practice it is mostly starting again from scratch.

You are starting over again, with a tiny authority boost.