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Hi Issa, This is a great question and something I actually asked Gary Illyes of Google on his Google AMA. For me the site:olddomain.com has been inconsistent; sometimes with domain name migrations everything tidies up within a few weeks, other times it lingers like Andreas' fantastic example of SEO Moz. Anyway, Gary said "You don't need to do anything. We're simply surfacing the old URLs to... Not confuse users i guess? Honestly, that URL we show in the results are sometimes fairly useless, maybe we should test again what happens if we remove them" From the answer I think Gary is trying to imply that keeping rankings whilst showing old domain is done to keep things familiar for users. Regarding the index returned during a site search, I understand this is historic. Here's the link for the full question and context: https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/ao3fmk/i_am_gary_illyes_googles_chief_of_sunshine_and/eg1lps1/ Hope this helps slightly! Nick

You're very welcome -Andy

Eric is completely right - Google does not list algorithmic penalties in GSC. Definitely try using Moz's Google Algorithm Change History to see if you can match an algorithm change to the drop in traffic. That said, you said that the rankings drop happened when they revamped the URL structure. It'd be surprisingly coincidental if an algorithm change hit them at the same time that they updated their URL structure. Here's what I'd do to figure out if the new URL structure could be the cause: Get a full list of inbound links from a site like Majestic or Ahrefs, specifically broken links (I wouldn't recommend getting this from Moz, because their lists of links aren't as comprehensive). See if they have a lot of now "broken" links that used to boost rankings of key pages on the old structure. Can you put in 301 redirects to get them to the right page? Can you reach out to those site owners and point them to the new versions of the pages? See if Wayback Machine has a copy of what their website used to look like. Is the internal linking structure really different? If it is (or if Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy of their old site), definitely do an internal architecture audit. It's possible that this new version of the site doesn't link internally as well as they used to, which has weakened their important pages. See if they had a web analytics software set up before they made the switch. If they do, find out what their top organic pages were before the change. Does the new site have a new page that answers the same questions that their old site did? It's possible that they removed key pages that were bringing in a lot of traffic. Or, possibly changed them, weakening their relevance to the keyword and ultimately losing their position. This may be more than you were originally asking for, so I'll stop there. Good luck on your search! Kristina

Hi Issa, You're right, duplicate content and bad usability could be triggering the slow rolling Panda 4.2, but I'd dig in a little more (apologies if you already did this research): You mentioned 200 pages are potentially duplicate; how many are on the site in total? If you have thousands of pages indexed, 200 duplicates probably aren't going to cause a Panda penalty. How similar are these postings? Just the page title? Or is the entire page extremely similar in content? (To answer this: if you made a keyword cloud for these similar job descriptions, would they show roughly the same mapping?) If it's just the page title that's similar, make sure to set the pages apart by including the name of the hiring company (which I assume makes the different positions unique) towards the beginning of the page title If the entire page is similar, then add more content to make the pages more unique, like a blurb about the hiring company, how long the job has been up, how many applicants the job has (if available), etc. Either way, make sure you don't have any old jobs that still have live pages! If possible, I'd redirect them to a similar job posting. Like John asked, did your traffic drop dramatically one day, or has it been tapering off? If it's tapering off, I'd guess it's not Panda. And, last, which pages lost traffic and rankings? Which keywords dropped in rankings? You may be able to tell how you were penalized by which keywords were most affected. Hope this helps, Kristina