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URGENT HELP/ADVICE NEEDED

I am so stressed and worried about my website domain change. I desperately need advice as soon as possible. I will try my best to keep this as brief as possible.

I have owned and operated my punk clothing business online at the URL toofastonline.com for 15 years now. And for a long long time we ranked #1 for punk clothing on Google & life was good. However, thanks to the arrival of several cheap marketplaces and other unanticipated changes our ranking dropped considerably. The last few years have been extremely hard on us, to say the least, we came really close to losing the business altogether.

But finally after lots of hard work & long hours, things started to improve. Ranking went back up, and we were busy again.

I had been toying with the idea of buying the domain TooFast.com for about 10 years, but I never had the money to do it until this now, so I made the leap and as of Jan 9, toofastonline.com became toofast.com. Unfortunately, I now know that I set up the domain change hastily, without doing any of the pre-work Google suggests to do. I didn’t know it then but I did it wrong. And our site which wasranking #7 for punk clothing on Jan. 8th is now number 51 and today is only Jan 24th!

I AM PANICKING.

I have looked for help, posting jobs on Shopify Experts site several times now, opening accounts with MOZ and SEM Rush, spending countless hours on the phone with GoDaddy, Shopify and even long chats with Google. I have spent all day everyday for the past two weeks trying fix everything to no avail. No one can start on my site issues fast enough. And I have been given so much wrong information that I feel like I have done irreparable damage.

I was (am) not qualified to make this kind of a site change alone. Too much was done too fast and without any real working knowledge Google SEO. My brother was the SEO guy and since he left the business I have just been struggling along with it, just trying to keep my head above water.

So now for the big question:

Should I temporarily change my Shopify stores domain back to toofastonline.com?

This way I couldstart at the beginning, fix all the 404 redirects, fix the 301 redirects, clean up code, get the site in top working condition, and then, as Google suggests in theirGoogle Search Console Change of Address Toolstart to do the change of address in small sections,  I can not afford to make any more reckless decisions. I have started and stopped, updated, fixed, changed and tried to fix again too many times now. I dont want Google to think I am trying something shady.. I’m not, I just don’t know what I’m doing, and I need help. Here is as much info as I can think of, I am more than willing to pay for help or do the work myself, as long as what I am doing is the right thing.

Any and all help/advice/offers are welcome!

Maureen

CONTACT DETAILS:

NAME:  Maureen Keough, Owner

EM:<a style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Maureen@TooFast.com</a>

PH: 856-599-1675 (W)

DETAILS OF OUR SET-UP THE APPS & SERVICES WE USE:

• Google Admin / G-Suite User

• Gmail for emails

• Godaddy holds our domains

• Shopify hosts our storefront.

• My Shopify store was located at TooFastOnline.com for about 5 years

• Our Domain Changed From toofastonline.com to toofast.com on Jan 9

• In Godaddy both toofastonline.com is being forwarded to toofast.com

• In Shopify I added toofast.com, made it my primary domain, but left toofastonline.com in there but it is just redirecting to toofast.com.

STEPS TAKEN TO CHANGE | ADD | VERIFY THE NEW DOMAIN

• GoDaddy DNS Records Both Sites - Updated Pointing to Shopify’s IP Address

• GoDaddy Subdomains For TooFastOnline.com - Redirected But Causing SSL/HTTPS/Privacy errors

• GoDaddy Subdomains For TooFast.com - Added But Causing SSL/HTTPS/Privacy errors

• Google Admin - Updated

• Gmail MX Records TooFast - Added and Updated

• Gmail MX Records TooFastOnline - Unchanged

• Google Merchant Center - Updated TooFastOnline is now TooFast

• Google Merchant Product Feed- Updated TooFastOnline is now TooFast

• Google Ads - Finally got the New Feed Approved and It is Working

• Google Search Console - Updated I Think

• Sitemaps - Added and Asked To Crawl

• Google Analytics Added TooFast As A Property Seems To Be Working

• Google Analytics Tag Updated in Shopify Admin

• Google Search Console - Requested to Move TooFastOnline.com to TooFast.com, still not done.

• No Redirects were made prior to the “Move”

• All Social Media Channels Links were Updated By Us

• Mailerlite MX Records For Bulk Emails - Updated/Verified

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?

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?

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!

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