Desperately seeking answers to fix my domain disaster!

Hi - I'm DESPERATE for some answers if anyone can help, please! 

My Squarespace site was www.digital-freelancer.org - domain is from 123 reg (NB: I don't seem to be able to transfer it from 123 reg to Squarespace to manage). My new domain - which I mean to apply to my existing website so I don't lose all the SEO juice is www.writefulcopy.com - Squarespace owned.

I tried to forward the digital-freelancer.org domain yesterday morning using the 123 reg dashboard, but I'm not sure I've done enough to make it work because nothing has changed.

Then I asked 123 reg to help, and they changed the second A record (see pic) to my old address yesterday pm. But... still nothing's fixed, and I don't understand what I need to do to get myself out of this pickle now!

Any advice to help me resolve this problem would be really appreciated. Just set up as fully self-employed so I need this site to work as it should. 😞

Thanks, Fi 

Hello Fi

Let me check that I'm on the same page. As I understand it, you had two separate Squarespace websites, one for writefulcopy.com and one for digital-freelancer.org, but you are closing down the digital-freelancer.org site and will only have one site moving forward?

If that is the case, if someone clicks an old search results that links to https://www.digital-freelancer.org/blog, do you want them to be directed to www.writefulcopy.com/blog or www.writefulcopy.com?

Hi Paul, thanks for your message. 

Ok.. so to clarify... I applied the writefulcopy.com domain to the existing digital-freelancer.org site on Friday 15th March. I did have a draft SS site for writefulcopy.com, but I then quickly realised that I shouldn't be starting from scratch with 8 years of digital-freelancer.org SEO to potentially preserve! 

And on the /blog question -  

"...https://www.digital-freelancer.org/blog, do you want them to be directed to www.writefulcopy.com/blog or www.writefulcopy.com?"

I want to maintain the paths, so https://www.digital-freelancer.org/blog would need to go to www.writefulcopy.com/blog etc. I thought I might have to manually apply 301s for this, but I was waiting until the main domain change had gone through successfully before I did all that mopping up!

Thanks, Fi 

55 minutes ago, fi1 said:

I want to maintain the paths. I thought I might have to manually apply 301s for this, but I was waiting until the main domain change had gone through successfully before I did all that mopping up!

To maintain the paths, you don't want to apply a "forward" with your domain host. Instead, you'll want to simply "connect" the domain to the website. By connecting it as a secondary domain, any URL used will automatically map, without the need to configure any 301s.

This guide should explain how to edit the DNS entries for your old domain so that it can be connected to the site. 

59 minutes ago, fi1 said:

I did have a draft SS site for writefulcopy.com

If you connected the domain to the draft site, you'll need to disconnect the domain before you try to connect it to another site.

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Hello, 

Ok, cool, so I already moved the writefulcopy.com domain to the digital-freelancer.org site last Friday (see pic), so that's done - but are you saying that I need to 'undo' the forwarding I applied on the digital-freelancer.org domain (i.e. through my 123 reg account)? 

I was hoping to retire the digital-freelancer.org domain in such a way that everything henceforth and also retrospectively was focused on the 'writefulcopy' domain/url (due to the rebrand I've just done on myself!).

Cheers, Fi 

*the digital-drum.com domain you'll see below has just always redirected to digital-freelancer.org , so it's not a concern here. Maybe the complication with all this has come from the fact that I've got a domain with a third-party provider - because I've obviously changed the primary domain/URL before (8 years ago).)