So the old domain should have the same content as the new one? Right now, I have blank pages on the old domain with a canonical link and a redirect. I could try duplicating the content, but it seems like having duplicate content might cause Google to penalize me even further?
Bing/DDG has the site indexed correctly, and I get a decent amount of traffic from them, but Google's market share is large enough that it's not really feasible to just ignore them.
(And I'm not buying ads on either one, this is about organic ranking)
I think I actually read your post earlier when I was trying to figure this out, so thanks for that! The symptoms do seem pretty similar, although the fact that the timeframe is different makes me think it's a different issue.
> There are some Google people on Twitter responding to concerns such as yours. @JohnMu is one of them. You can send a private message to him about it.
Thanks for the suggestions. I think those 4 all look OK. The site content is purely static HTML (and some images) that hasn't changed significantly in months, so I'm guessing that's not the issue.
I'd rather not post the site URL here; is it OK if I email you?
I think the person above is telling you to set up a webserver to 301 redirect pages from your old domain to your new one. I think that will tell Google that you have chosen to move the site to a new domain, not just copied the site off someone else
The old domain was a *.github.io domain (which I migrated to a custom domain), so I don't think it's possible to use my own server for it.
Google did pick up the relationship correctly, at least in the beginning - the new domain got the same ranking as the old one, and the "backlinks" section of the search console shows links to the old domain under the property information for the new domain. So it seems like this type of redirect does have an effect, unless it somehow expires after a few months and a 301 redirect doesn't?
If the old site was on a domain that you own, remove the CNAME to github pages, and point it instead to a server you control, that returns 301 redirects to the new site.
The 301's are a standard way to do this, while the meta refresh tags are dubious at best.
The old site was hosted on Github Pages, so there isn't a way to do a server-side redirect AFAIK, but I replaced each page on the old site with a client-side redirect in the following format:
Were you (1) using example.github.io as a CNAME with another domain, or (2) were people going to example.github.io directly?
I'm still not 100% clear on how the previous domain was configured with github pages
if it's 1) then you should be able to set up redirects for the domain using something like cloudflare to serve the 301s to the old domain.
if it's 2) then there really aren't any more "simple" solutions that you can implement purely technically. You've already added the canonical reference and the meta refresh. You could also add an A tag link to "Download the software on our new website" in addition to the other measures. Users are already sent over via the meta refresh, but the link will encourage crawlers who skip that tag to find you as well.
If your goal is to show up when people search the name of the software (example: "iterm2"), then the solution is to register on every possible social media website you can find and link them to your new domain. In addition to that it's worth using an online PR service to distribute a press release with a link to your new site announcing the new domain.
If there's a more generic term (example: "mac terminal software") then you've got a longer road ahead of you with a regular SEO campaign.
Sounds good, good luck. Assuming your name is relatively unique then this should be something that resolves within 4-6 weeks. If it takes longer you might need to do some high profile PR to get the name out there and linked to the right place.
