CODEWITHSUNDEEP
search-enginegoogle-search-console
curious1
curious1

Reputation: 14717

Get rid of old links to a retired website in Google search

I have a website that has been replaced by another website with a different domain name.

In Google search, I am able to find links to the pages on the old site, and I hope they will not show up in future Google search.

Here is what I did, but I am not sure whether it is correct or enough.

  1. Access to any page on the old website will be immediately redirected to the homepage of the new website. There is no one-to-one page mapping between the two sites. Here is the code for the redirect on the old website:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://example.com" >

  1. I went to Google Webmasters site. For the old website, I went to Fetch as Google, clicked "Fetch and Render" and "Reindex".

Really appreciate any input.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 512

Answers (1)

GDVS
GDVS

Reputation: 448

A few things you'll want to do here:

  1. You need to use permanent server redirects, not meta refresh. Also I suggest you do provide one-to-one page mapping. It's a better user experience, and large numbers of redirects to root are often interpreted as soft 404s. Consult Google's guide to site migrations for more details.
  2. Rather than Fetch & Render, use Google Search Console's (Webmaster Tools) Change of Address tool. Bing have a similar tool.

A common mistake is blocking crawler access to an retired site. That has the opposite of the intended effect: old URLs need to be accessible to search engines for the redirects to be "seen".

Upvotes: 1

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