The same site on two addresses, and so half of it twice
What happens when you change your name and the old domain keeps running, and how to check it in five minutes.
A company changes its name. The new domain is bought, the site moves, and the old address stays live because business cards are still going around. That is sensible, and as long as the redirects are right it works.
It goes wrong in the places nobody looks at any more. We ran into one recently: the
robots.txt on the live domain listed a sitemap pointing at the old domain, with
over four thousand addresses all sitting on it. The redirects, incidentally, were
perfect — all variants landed on the new domain with the right canonical. Only:
the live domain effectively had no sitemap of its own.
Why that can hurt
Everything you build up hangs off an address. Links from other people, the history a search engine has with a page, how often someone clicked through. Split that across two addresses and neither of them gets far.
Redirects solve most of it, which is why this is not a disaster but a leak. What keeps the leak open are the places where the old address is still written out literally, and those all sit in corners you rarely visit.
Five things you can check yourself
1. Your robots.txt. Type your address with /robots.txt after it. Near the
bottom is a line starting with Sitemap:. Is that the same domain you are on?
2. The sitemap itself. Open the address from that line and look at the first ten entries. Are they on the domain you are on now?
3. www and non-www. Try all four: with and without www, on http and on
https. All four should end up on one address, not three on one and one on the
other.
4. The canonical. View the page source and search for canonical. It should
hold the address you want the page to be known by, which is always the new domain.
5. Your own links. Search your site for the old domain name. A menu item or a button still pointing at the old address sends every visitor through a redirect that was not necessary.
And the blog
For the same reason a blog belongs on yourcompany.com/blog/ rather than
blog.yourcompany.com. Google itself says the difference is small, and in practice
we still see it: a subfolder rides on what the domain has already built up, and a
subdomain rather more often starts from nothing. It also costs nothing to get right
straight away, and moving it later means dragging a tail of redirects behind you.
What you get out of it
This kind of work feels like tidying rather than growth. It is. But it is also the only kind of work that pays you back without a single word being written: what you already had ends up in one place instead of two.
Frequently asked questions
Should I cancel the old domain?
No, keep it and let it redirect. Cancelling means every old link dies, which is exactly what you do not want. A domain that only redirects costs a few tens a year and protects everything that ever pointed at it.
Which kind of redirect should it be?
A permanent one, a 301. A temporary redirect tells a search engine the old address is still the real one, and then the split stays in place. This is a setting at your hosting provider or in your CMS, and usually a single choice.
How long does it take to settle?
Weeks to months, depending on how often your site gets crawled. There is no button for it and nothing to speed it up beyond supplying a correct sitemap on the new domain.
Who should fix this?
Whoever manages your site. These are settings in the CMS and at the hosting provider, and it is an hour of work for someone who knows where they live. The hard part is not the change but finding all the places; that is what the list above is for.