NewzDash says a UK publisher lost 98 percent of trending-news visibility two weeks after moving from co.uk to .com

Search Engine Journal reports that a UK news publisher's visibility for trending Google news queries fell 98 percent in the two weeks after it switched from a co.uk domain to a .com. The figure comes from NewzDash founder John Shehata, whose product tracks Top Stories and organic results across trending UK news queries. Matt G. Southern's piece went up on 8 September.

Shehata says his product had watched the site on its co.uk domain for 14 months. During that period the publisher held between one and two percent visibility across the news queries NewzDash monitors, against a three to six percent range for similar-sized peers. Two weeks after the move, visibility on the new domain was 0.02 percent, a 98 percent drop by NewzDash's count. Four months on, Shehata reports only a handful of isolated appearances on the .com. He says the publisher moved the whole site overnight because it wanted one global domain and wanted to stop being classified as a UK site by ad systems.

Why the number differs from a standard rank tracker

Shehata says the SEO tools he compares against, which he does not name, estimate a 60 to 70 percent drop on the same site. NewzDash reports 98 percent. According to Shehata, the gap comes from what each tool measures: the other tools follow a fixed set of mostly evergreen keywords, while NewzDash tracks visibility on a rotating set of trending news queries across Top Stories and organic results. Shehata says the impact was deepest on the news surfaces.

Search Engine Journal notes the caveat that Shehata's post does not name the publisher or share the underlying data, so the 98 percent cannot be independently checked. The site was also losing visibility during several core updates before the move, and Shehata acknowledges internal technical issues likely contributed. NewzDash's data cannot separate Top Stories from organic in the decline.

Google's site-move guide and the news-surface gap

Google's site-move guide covers URL mapping, permanent redirects, the Change of Address tool in Search Console, and monitoring URLs after the switch. It states that permanent redirects will not harm PageRank and warns of ranking fluctuations during recrawling. For medium sites, recrawl can take weeks, and larger sites longer. The guide advises against combining a domain move with a CMS change or a redesign, and it recommends testing on one section for large sites, ideally a section that does not update often.

Shehata frames news-surface visibility as different from ordinary organic ranking. He argues Google weighs hostname signals such as publication history and editorial trust on its news surfaces, and that a 301 passes link equity but "may not carry that history". Google's guide does not say whether news history is hostname-based, and it does not describe how those signals carry over on a domain switch. Shehata's advice to move content in sections and wait for the new domain to appear in Google News before a full switch lines up with Google's own guidance for large sites, but the Google News angle is not covered in Google's guide.

A newsroom weighing a similar consolidation now has one tracked case that points the same way as Google's advice, and a clear reason to measure trending-query visibility before the switch rather than after.

Source

• Primary source: Search Engine Journal, "UK Publisher Loses 98% Of News Search Visibility After .com Move" by Matt G. Southern, 8 September 2026.
• Data attributed to John Shehata / NewzDash.