Forwarding from old website addresses
Request Type:
General Assistance
Issue/Request:
Hello,
When our site went live a few months ago I requested that our old site be forwarded to our new site. I was notified that this was done, however, it hasn’t been. Also, is there a way to get our new site to come up when searched for on Google instead of our old site?
Old site: environment.yale.edu/gisf
new site: www.yale.edu/gisf
Thanks!
sorry - duh - new site: gisf.yale.edu
Hello Christina,
When your site went live we created a redirect so that when users go to www.yale.edu/gisf, they are automatically redirected to http://gisf.yale.edu/. This redirect is working and is not related to Google Search. What you are referring to is the indexing of your website, which is what Google does approximately once per month where they do a complete index of the entire internet.
To see if your site has been indexed you can enter the following into your browser address bar: site:http://gisf.yale.edu/. This will give you a list of pages that have been indexed by Google during their site crawl. I’ve done so and it seems to already have been indexed by Google.
I recommend you doing the following. First create a Sitemap (XML Sitemap module), Second activate the Google Analytics module and signup for a Google Analtyics account, and Third is to sign up for Search Console. Search Console will allow you to verify your sitemap and also request new site crawls. Once your site has a sitemap, Google will know which pages are the ones you want crawled and also determine that the other cached pages are no longer needed. In time the old indexed pages will be deleted from the search results.
Josue