Sitemap submission for site migration?
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Hi mozzers,
We're about to migrate 4 domains into 1.
- Is there a particular way I should generate and submit the sitemap or should I just follow the same protocol as for one domain? Should I even worry submitting a sitemap when the site has this drupal module?
- I have access to the webmaster tools of all domains, should I do something specific on the accounts that are migrating besides submitting a sitemap?
Thanks for letting me know!
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Also wanted to point out, John Mueller from Google just asswered a very similar question here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/RTfC0dCd8B8/discussion - not sure if this is the same exact situation but thought it might help.
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The important thing to test when submitting a sitemap like this is whether or not Google accepts it. Once you submit the URL through Webmaster tools for the sitemap, just follow up and make sure the URLs you're saying are here have shown up in their indexed pages list. As long as these match your intended submission, or a big enough sample does if it's a huge sitemap, you should be fine.
Equally as important, if not more so, is making sure that 100% of the old URL paths have been 301 redirected to their new homes, especially especially especially when you have domains with a higher authority being retired for a better sounding domain name, you want to seed the authority for the new site, not just 301 all the URLs to the homepage or something, but go through every old indexed page and make sure they have been forwarded.
A fun trick for this is to use authority tools like Moz or Ahrefs to determine which old URLs had the most links, and that way if you are completely strapped for time you can at least make sure that say your top 100 URLs with the most authority have been fully forwarded to their intended replacement - of course doing ALL old URLs redirected to their new URL would be best.
Hoping you did this with the migration but figured I'd cover it just in case. Hope this helped!
Cheers,
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Hi!
I'm not an expert in Drupal so for now I'm only to help you with point 2. The domain that you are migrating should be marked as that the domain is now being migrated to another one. You can do that via this tool: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
Martijn.
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