New site not appearing in index after change of address, no feedback from google webmaster tools

Posted by Duffy on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Duffy
Published on 2012-08-21T00:55:11Z Indexed on 2012/09/21 9:51 UTC
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Our change of address seems to not be taking effect. Here's the story so far:

We're a web company and our product is called The New Hive. Our site used to be at thenewhive.com, but we decided to switch to newhive.com (drop the "the", it's cleaner).

So the timeline of what I've tried, starting on July 29th:

  • used 301 redirects for all pages (e.g. thenewhive.com/tag/art => newhive.com/tag/art)

At this point we noticed that we had disappeared from search results when searching "The New Hive", the front page used to be all links to our site plus a couple news articles about the company. So on August 5th I:

  • verified new domain in webmaster tools (old domain was already verified)
  • submitted a change of address request on August 5th with Webmaster Tools / Configuration / Change of Address

Then after another week, on August 13th I did this:

  • Went to Webmaster Tools / Health / Fetch as google
  • fetched our homepage and a couple sub pages, all successfully
  • clicked "Submit to Index" for homepage

As of today (August 23rd) we're still not showing up in the index. We're getting no warnings or feedback of any kind from the dashboard so I'm inclined to think something's broken with the dashboard rather than that something's wrong with our site from an SEO perspective.

From the dashboard:

No new messages or recent critical issues.

Crawl Errors: No data available.

From Health -> Index Status:

Total indexed 0

Ever crawled 42,490

Not selected 12

Blocked by robots 0

I'm really at a loss here, any help would be appreciated.

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