no results for website search

Hi

I was hoping someone could help with some advice.

I have just published my new website with squarespace. However I also still have a old website with another provider. My new website address is the same as the old apart from ending ( .org.uk ) my old website is  ending (.com).

When I search for my new website the only results I get are for my old website and nothing for the new one.

Can anyone advise how to solve this.  Sorry if I sound useless but I am not great with tech stuff.

It takes several hours for an address relocation to propagate through the internet and even more for search engines to find a site with an address change like yours. The more hits to the new one the quicker the engines find it, so get your friends and family to look at it, a lot. 

Hi @glassworks It sounds like you have a different domain for your new website. Does your new website have pretty much the same content as your old website? Is there a reason why you are keeping your old website live?

There could be different things at play here:

1) Does Google know about your new website?

It can take time for Google to index new website, but you can check that. If Google doesn't know about it, you can help speed things up by telling Google about your new site via Google Search Console.

2) If your new website is in Google's index, but your new website is not showing up on Google search. 

This could mean your new website is simply not ranking high enough for it to be visible, e.g. not on the first page or ranking lower than your old website.

Unless you have done work to optimise your new website, it is likely that your old website will rank higher given that it has been around for longer amongst other things. 

For more information, I have an article that details the above steps you can do when  Squarespace website not appearing in Google search.

Hope this helps. 

As mentioned in the first response above, it can take some time for Google to find a new website and then more time for it include results from that site in its index. 

The .com and .org.uk sites are treated as completely separate entities by Google, so there's a danger that your old site will continue to rank higher than the new one because it has been around longer. 

To resolve the situation I would do the following:

First, install Google Analytics (GA) on your new site. You'll need this later and it's best to do it before you move on to the next step.

Second, add the old .com domain name to your .org.uk Squarespace site while ensuring the .org.uk remains as the default domain. This is achieved by changing the DNS settings for your old .com domain as per instructions in Squarespace admin system. 

This means that your old site is no longer accessible and people trying to access .com will be redirected to .org.uk

This is only  part of the solution because the page names will be different between the two sites and visitors could be directed from search results to a 404 - Page not available  error. 

Third, look at the landing pages to your new site in the Google Analytics site you set up. 404 errors will show up as page names from the old site. If any of them are getting significant traffice you can set up URL mappings . These URL mappings should point from the page url of the old site to the most relevant page url on the new site

For example:

/aboutus.html -> /about-us 301
/oldurl -> /newurl 301

When I've done this for some large site migrations we often set up a lot of URL mappings in advance and then check Google Analytics for any that slipped through the cracks. 

Depending on the level of inbound traffic to the old site from search, links on other sites & blogs, social posts, etc you should be able to set up all the URL mappings you need by initially checking Google Analytics hourly (for busy sites) or daily for most sites. After a few days I would then switch to checking once a week for a couple of weeks. That should trap all the 404s that are getting any significant traffic. 

Hi @glassworks,

I can help you out here with this situation. Below, I've added some potential solutions to help you out:

• If you want to go ahead with the new domain (.org.uk), first you need to take care of the old one (.com). In this case, redirecting the old domain to the new one would be the best solution. Let me know what your old domain is hosted on, and I can share a guide for this.

However, here are some insights to consider:

• How much traffic does the old domain bring in? Is it significant? List the pages that bring you traffic, and then you can add manual redirections from the old URL to the new URL on the new domain.
• If the old domain doesn’t bring much traffic, you can redirect the old domain to the new one from the domain registrar without thinking about the pages. In this case, all the old URLs will be redirected to the homepage of the new domain.
  • How to Set Up 301 Redirects in Squarespace - https://youtu.be/XkFcD9EukBY?si=OPr_2PVcTFwi1qCu 
  • URL mappings Squarespace - https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815308-URL-mappings

To remove the old domain from the search results:

• You can initially set a site-wide no-index tag to tell the search engines to stop showing the pages from the old domain (if possible). Let me know what your old domain is hosted on, and I can share a guide for this.
• To make the process faster on Google, you can send a URL removal request using Google Search Console to remove the old domain from the index.
  • Google Search Console's screenshot: https://prnt.sc/TbkdDzLpeXK0 
  • Removals in Google Search Console: https://youtu.be/h223mCgbmf4 

Following resources that might be helpful for you:

• How to Set Up 301 Redirects in Squarespace - https://youtu.be/XkFcD9EukBY?si=OPr_2PVcTFwi1qCu 
• URL mappings Squarespace - https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815308-URL-mappings 
• Removals and SafeSearch reports Tool - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en 

Thanks,
Sadul Sifat.