We changed our domain, I used the move tool in Google Search Console and I am having our site redirected and go daddy, and now I spoke with someone who suggest we do a 301 redirect for all pages on our site and I’m not sure that’s the correct move.

[TooFast13]

We just changed our domain name after 15 years. when I bought the new domain name I called Go Daddy and they instructed me to contact my google G sweet admin account and change all of our emails over which I did and then I went into Shopify who is my host and changed my primary domain there and then I went back to Go Daddy and had my old website forwarded to my new site. since then there has been nothing but problems with Google. my product feed from my merchant center account has been suspended three or four times now, I tried to rename and move all of my Google accounts from my old domain to my new one, but I am not an SEO person... after making the changes I have started google chats with analytics department with the merchant center with Google as they all keep saying that it looks fine but I’m not convinced because the product feed keeps getting disapproved. So I posted an ad for help and the Guy I spoke with suggested I do a 301 redirect for every single page on my old site,  But I’m concerned that might confuse things further? I’ve already started the move in Google Search console And in Shopify I added the old domain back into the domains section and am having it redirectEd that way too...

I guess I’m just looking to know which way I should proceed, any and all advice is warmly welcome thank you in advance

Maureen

[seobrighton]

@toofast13 I hope you got an answer to this.

If not, some ideas to find all the old URLs would be to look at the Google Search Console instance for your old domain and see all the pages that were indexed by Google in there.

Another option (although possibly less accurate) would be to do a site: search in Google to again see the pages that Google has indexed for your old domain. You can do this by entering site:website.com into Googles search box (replace website.com with your old domain). There is a useful post about this here.

This may not result in all the URLs but it should give you the important ones that Google knows about.

I hope this helps and may even be of use to somebody who is having the same problem in the future.

[TooFast13]

Hi thanks for responding!

1- Do you know of a good/efficient  way to find all the websites that were linking to our old site?
2- regarding the site map, it is automatically created by Shopify so I don’t think I have much control over that unfortunately? I’m having a hard time getting a list of all of my old URLs because when I changed the domain name in Shopify my old website basically became nonexistent. I’m wondering if I should create another Accounts and Shopify just to host my old website temporarily so that I can get all that information out of it?

[TooFast13]

Hi I guess I’m not sure that I can do that because I am hosted on Shopify and I don’t think I have access to the htaccess. 
My old website is still listed as a domain in my  Shopify admin but I don’t think it’s actually hosted  anywhere, I wonder if I could post my old website on go daddy temporarily  to create the redirects?

[Epiphany2]

I don't recommend old domain redirect to new domain in the domain registrar. You should host the domain in your website host, then use a simple .htaccess file to redirect all traffic on the old domain to the new domain.

<code>**Options +FollowSymLinks**
**RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^OLDDOMAIN\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://NEWDOMAIN.com [R=301,L]**</code>

Use your favorite text to like Notepad++ to create a .htaccess file and add the fire above. Make sure you replaced the domain name with your old and new domains respectively.

Then upload it to you old domain's hosting root folder (public html folder)

If you do it that way every click from the search engine to your old domain will always be redirected to the new domain.

Lastly, you will also need to add both domains to google search console and use the change domain tool to let google know about the redirect.

Adam Chronister recently conducted a simple experiment on this issue and he started seeing positive effects almost instantly.

I have used it on many of my websites and it's working perfectly well.

[TooFast13]

Hi I’m so sorry I have tried to respond to this post three times now but I keep getting an error hopefully this works, thank you for getting back to me it is much appreciated. We started the move last Friday night and so now it’s been approximately a week I hope I’m not too late! I guess I will go forward with the 301 redirects of my pages thanks again!

[MattJanaway]

It sounds like you are pretty deep into the move, Maureen.

A domain migration is one of the riskiest things you can do in SEO. There are so many moving parts and it has to be planned meticulously. There are hundreds of things that need to be considered and well strategised, including (but not limited to):

• Checking indexed pages to 301 redirect them all to the most relevant page on the new domain
• Checking incoming backlinks to ensure that they are also redirected so you don't lose any link equity
• Crawking the old website (you can use a tool for this) and extracting all URL's for a redirect plan
• Making sure that the internal link architecture and anchor text structure is similar
• Ensuring that Google Search Console has been told about the domain change
• Ensuring that the new pages can be crawled and rendered correctly
• Submitting the sitemap of the new website to Google Search Console
• Ironing out any technical issues (I don't want to alarm you, but there are a lot of things that need checking here)
• Making sure the content is as close to, or the same as, the old website
• Making sure that the page titles, meta description and headers are pulled over in the correct way

You were advised correctly, every single URL on the old domain needs redirecting to the same version of that page on the new website.

When did you make the change? It might be too late to recover everything, but it's worth a good try!