Old URLs Still in Google 1 Year After Domain Name change

[mhansen]

Almost 1 year ago one of our clients changed domain names as part of a branding restructure. The old domain was +10 years old and we had a lot of work to do, obviously, in order to preserve ranking, etc. Thankfully, the new site and new domain work just fine, and we've had no issues whatsoever.

Except... ALL of our olddomain.com/ URL's still show as indexed in Google when using the site:olddomain.com query.

We have the olddomain.com parked on the same server as newdomain.com, and it only has one file, an htaccess with the 301 redirect from all olddomain URLs to the newdomain.com.

When I check the cache copy of the olddomain.com urls in Google, they all show the NEW domain in the address, as well as the new website in content.

When I check http headers, everything is correct... 301 >> 200 status.

We've reached out and updated hundreds of external backlinks to the new domain, though there are still many linking to the olddomain.com pages.

We updated the site address in GSC (Used the Domain Moved tool), as well as all GA and other Google needs.

Is this normal? What am I missing?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:05 pm (utc) on Mar 6, 2020]
[edit reason] disabled smile face for this post [/edit]

[not2easy]

301 redirect from all olddomain URLs to the newdomain.com.

I hope this does not mean that all pages from the old domain are being redirected to the new domain's home page. That could mean a lot of "soft 404s" because the old content is not found at new domain's home page.

[mhansen]

@Not2easy - Thanks for jumping in. Each old page url is redirected to the new page url correctly. (HTTP Header reports 301 /oldexacturl > 200 /newexacturl, etc) The only change we made was at the root domain level, everything in the rest of the path stayed identical. We handled this in htaccess /$1 .

It looks like this was addressed about a year ago in a Gary Illyes AMA on Reddit.

"Recently I noticed very slow times to digest old domains redirected. Having cases where the old site even 301ed and migrated from gsc still covering most of the SERPs"

Q. Why does this happen & how can we avoid it? (assume we have already submitted the domain change to Search Console!)

garyillyes 1 point ·1 year ago

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

Source [reddit.com]

[not2easy]

So if you were to visit an old URL it does not exist but rather redirects via 301 to the new equivalent URL on the new domain. In that case then it does seem that they just move (very) slowly. Since the conversation quoted is over a year old, that indicates that they haven't done anything to correct the problem at Google.

If you sill have the old domain listed at your GSC account I would check to see what it showsthere, whether they still list anything like an old sitemap. They used to stop indexing old URLs (for example, in a change to https) within a few days.

[tangor]

There's no real upside for g to clear old URLS from the serps ... their biz is what's new.

There's also the secondary that they keep checking URLS previously visited to see of "expired" or "dead" or even "penalized to non-existence" have resurfaced.

Because of these logical behaviors I don't waste a lot of time on why g is looking up "old stuff"...

Rather they find the NEW STUFF!

YMMV

(My anal retentive is very minuscule).

[RedBar]

Is this normal?

After 3-4 years I am finally seeing some expired domains disappearing completely but during this time what was in their "cache" showed under the old URL name even though the 301 had been done correctly.

[mhansen]

I'm just going to carry-on with business as usual on the olddomain issue. It's not hurt us in any way, and if G wants to keep theme for the sake of "not confusing users", whatever that may be, ho hum....

Thanks all - I was concerned I missed something, but it appears to be nothing.