Domain change issue

Problems after migration to new domain

[andrea7887]

Hello, for about a week I have been experiencing a major indexing problem on my site.

A few months ago I migrated from the old domain to the new one. Everything seemed to be going smoothly and the new pages of the new domain were starting to be indexed. Last week my server suffered an attack and for an hour the site went offline. When it came back online, it actually disappeared from the search engine. In fact, many pages have lost indexing while the Google robot has taken the old pages of the old domain as the main ones, which however are unfindable in the search.

Every day that passes it gets worse and more and more pages of the new domain are being de-indexed. Do you have any advice on how to re-index the new domain?

Thanks for any help

[edited by: not2easy at 6:53 pm (utc) on Feb 28, 2025]
[edit reason] ToS/No links, please [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hi andrea7887 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Do you have a GSC account for the old and new domains? If you have submitted a sitemap (not required) they will try to find the URLs you've listed. If you had submitted a sitemap for the old domain, you should remove it and noindex the pages. If "both" sites host the same content it would be considered duplicate if you're still trying to index the same content on both sites. Does the old domain rewrite the old URLs to the new site with a 301?

Until folks have a better handle on your situation, we can only comment on generalities.

[andrea7887]

Hi,
thank you for your reply.
yes, I have a GSC account linked to both domains. I have submitted the sitemap for both the old domain and the new one. So do you suggest to remove completely the old sitemap? I tought that the old sitemap was needed in order to perform correctly the redirect to the new domain. What do you think about?

Yes, the old domain has 301 redirects to the new domain, should i put the noindex tag inside the http header 301 response?

thank you again

[not2easy]

A 301 rewrite would send people to the new domain without a sitemap. A sitemap is intended to tell Google what URLs/pages you want to have indexed. So if you still have meta tags for "index" and a rewrite that sends people to a different site, it would confuse their results.

You don't need a sitemap to use a rewrite rule, that goes in your .htaccess file (or configuration settings). IF your pages do not have any meta-tags, then you can send a noindex header, but if pages do have "index" meta-tags then you are offering confusion.

[JennyWilson]

You should keep the old sitemap in place, at least temporarily, while Google gets accustomed to processing the redirects, then remove it once the migration is fully applied. The 301 redirects are sufficient for passing over SEO benefits to the new domain. Do not send a no-index tag in the HTTP header response along with any 301 redirects, as that will prevent Google from correctly following and indexing the new URLs. Let the redirects take their course so that Google can attribute ranking and traffic to the new domain.