Static XML Sitemap

[a_toohill]

I performed a change of address for one of our sites to go to a new domain. In the process we left out the submission of the old site's sitemap at the new property in google webmaster console and realize now that we need to do this step.  The old site has all these domains still getting indexed:  https://www.google.com/#q=site:citychurchfamily.org .  I believe that I should be making a static xml sitemap file, upload it to the new domain's root directory, and then test/submit it to google on the new domain's GWM property.  Question, should the xml sitemap contain entries for all the old domain's links that are currently still being indexed and what is the fastest way to generate this sitemap?  Any insight is greatly appreciated.

[a_toohill]

Hi Paul,

Thank-you for sharing that.  Question, over the past few weeks we've seen our new domain climb back up into the spot the old domain was at before we made the domain change.  I still haven't added a sitemap of all the old urls to the new google webmaster property for the new domain.  At this point I'm questioning whether I should even do this at all since I'm concerned doing so at this stage may produce some sort of negative result.  I can see the index amount of the old site urls slowly climbing down but there is still a decent amount of them:  https://www.google.com/#q=site:citychurchfamily.org .  Does it still make sense to submit a sitemap of all the old urls at this stage?  If I don't will all the old urls eventually stop being indexed by Google?  Should I remove the old site entirely at citychurchfamily.org but keep my 301 redirects in place on the server?  I appreciate your first response and any help/insight you offer here.

Sincerely,

Andrew

[ThompsonPaul]

One of the quick things you can do to help the process along is to ensure you've used the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console to alert the SE that the address has officially changed. (You'll need to do this from the verified GSC account of the original website.)

But yes, uploading a sitemap from the old site and leaving it in place for a short while can speed up the process of the search engines detecting the changeover and reindexing under only the new URLs.

The temp sitemap should definitely include ALL the old site's URLs if at all possible. If you don't have a backup of the original site's xml sitemap to work with, there are a number of workarounds.

• Install a backup of the old site on a staging server and crawl it to create the new sitemap (you'll need to adjust the output to correct the domain name, but that'll be easy using basic search/replace tools) [Most complete method]
• Use a tool like Screaming Frog (or a static sitemap creation tool like xml-sitemaps.com that Robert mentions) to crawl the Wayback Machine's best-archived version of the site. [Dependent on level of detail on Wayback]
• Scrape the results of that site: Google search and construct a sitemap from those URLs [Likely least complete, but quickest access.]

You'll only want to leave the alternate sitemap live for a short period of time, or it can impact the crawling of the legit new sitemap. Search Engines don't like sitemaps with a lot of "dirt" or redirected pages in them. Once you're monitoring shows a large number of the old URLs dropping out of the index, remove the sitemap and let the Change of Address and the 301-redirects do the rest of the job they're designed for.

Hope that all makes sense?

Paul