Google search results go to 404 after migrating domain

Question

I used to have 2 hosting accounts on GoDaddy, but I recently combined everything into one. Which meant that I transferred my domain and I guess it automatically changed my A record and other settings. Now Google search results always go to 404.

So I go to the top search result for my site and it shows a 404. Then I take that exact same url and paste it into a new tab and it works perfectly.

In the Google Search Console whenever I try and "Fetch as Google" it shows me a "Not Found" which makes sense based on the search results.

So I have no idea what to do next. My site is running perfectly fine when you navigate to it directly, but if you click a google search result link then it doesn't.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

So I go to the top search result for my site and it shows a 404. Then I take that exact same url and paste it into a new tab and it works perfectly.

There's a couple possibilities:

1. Either you just cleaned your browser cache before attempting to load the domain, or google is still caching old results. Consider accessing your page from another external link, and if you can, then I'd wait the same amount of time as your HTML is cached (probably one more hour).

2. You might want to check your server configuration files (including .htaccess if your server is apache). Its possible that someone hacked your site in such a way where requests coming from certain IP's and/or certain browsers will produce an error. If your site is made with a CMS like wordpress, and you have no advanced script coding knowledge, then I suggest downloading all the important work that you put into the site, reinstall the CMS and then load the data back on and change all passwords at once and make all passwords more secure and most importantly, don't give passwords out to unauthorized people.