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Lets say I have a site called oldsite.com. Then I bought a new domain newsite.com. I transferred the content from oldsite.com to newsite.com. In the process I also updated the URLs of all the posts and pages. I am redirecting oldsite.com to newsite.com.

How do I permanently remove all the URLs of oldsite.com from the Google index? I am doing so because newsite.com is quite new and doesn't have great many links pointing to it. Webmaster tool only allows to hide a URL temporarily, I want to permanently hide them.

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    Google will automatically remove URLs that redirect as long as the redirects are permanent. What type of redirects are you using and how long has it been? It may take Google a few weeks.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 9:13
  • @StephenOstermiller I have tried this technique, and yes redirects are permanent. Even after 2 months i can still see URLs of old site in Google's index.
    – Cody
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 9:26
  • @StephenOstermiller Why the urls are still in the google's index ?
    – Cody
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 9:33
  • I don't know what the problem is if you have redirects in place. Can you disclose the actual sites so that we can take a look?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 9:34
  • I can confirm that your redirects are indeed 301 permantent. If I use a site: query on Google for your old site, I see two listing: one is the home page and the other is a wordpress admin link. Both redirect. Google has clearly crawled the home page because it cached the home page from the new site. The second link redirects to 404 not found. I would expect Google to remove both of those eventually. I've never seen Google keep them for so long.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 10:59

2 Answers 2

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If you want search engines to stop crawling your old website, just configure a robots.txt in your DocumentRoot of oldsite.com to let them know:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Additionally

you can then go to Google Webmaster Tools and delete them temporarily. That should be enough until the crawler visits you again. To permanently delete it from the web...you have to do exactly that --> no DNS-resolving = no requests on oldsite.com

Just to make sure:

All Rewrites from oldsite.com to newsite.com should include [R=permanent] as a parameter.

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  • As i am redirecting oldsite.com to newsite.com. Does this create any problems for newsite.com ? Will search engines still able to index contents of newsite.com
    – Cody
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 16:41
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    Assuming that your oldsite and newsite don't share the same DocumentRoot, newsite.com would still be crawled. robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html for more details...and for clarification: put one robots.txt in each DocumentRoot (one for oldsite and one for newsite) and set the oldsite-robots.txt to disallow everything, while you allow everything in the other one.
    – Hello Fishy
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 17:18
  • When a robot looks for the "/robots.txt" file for URL, it strips the path component from the URL (everything from the first single slash), and puts "/robots.txt" in its place. For example, for "example.com/shop/index.html, it will remove the "/shop/index.html", and replace it with "/robots.txt", and will end up with "example.com/robots.txt".
    – Hello Fishy
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 17:18
  • I'd be delighted if you could mark the answer as 'correct' if it was for you :) Otherwise let me know so I can help...
    – Hello Fishy
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 17:14
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This looks like migration, so you have to be patient in order for Google to acknowledge all the changes you made. Crawl your current website with tools like Screaming Frog or Website Auditor, to detect possible redirect chains and loops who potentially can confuse search engines. Use fetch and render in your Search Console on your old domain to see if Google is seeing those permanent redirects you previously created.

If you haven't verified your both domains in Search Console, do that and ask for Change of address https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
To be able to do so, you will have to be owner of both domains in Search Console.

Extra note:

Also, reach out to all webmasters where you have backlinks to update them with new domain name. After all, give Google some time to get new data (up to one month).

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