Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobltobs | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't this at the same time when ProtonMail migrated their site from a .ch to a .com? I would be thankful if I would be able to get such a special treatment from Google for a borked migration. For most of us it is a death sentence when we bork a migration, protonmail gets help and then they whine about it.

View on HN

That doesn't really fit the way web-crawler-based search engines work.

If the search engine is working properly then if the new site looks the same to users it ought to look the same to the search engine. If Google's crawler didn't find the new site at all then they need a better crawler.

Maybe this was incompetence rather than malice on Google's part, but it was one of the two.

(An exception would be if you migrate a site and mess up your robots.txt or similar to forbid the search engine doing its job. But evidently that didn't happen here because the fix was at Google's end.)

What do you mean by borked migration? What could Proton mail have done better?

Without knowing their migration strategy it is hard to say. A few things I notice that get borked often with migrations are not handling redirects & internal links properly, not updating sitemaps & canonical tags, and not checking Google Search Console & robots.txt

My question was more specifically about ProtonMail's domain migration which the commenter I was replying to implied to have specific knowledge of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com