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So, on September 9th purchased my .com blog domain with WordPress.org. It was previously on Blogger.com. I'm fairly confident that I've successfully set up redirects on the Blogger, because when I google my old blog, and click on a post from that old blogspot, it goes right to my new blog site.

I'm wondering though, on Blogger, should I tell Google to not make my old blogspot.com blog visible to search engines? I did add my new .com to Google Search Console, and it doesn't seem to have indexed all my old posts. I did just submit a sitemap for the new site though and I've already submitted an address change to Google.

At what point, if at all, should I tell Google to not index my old blogspot.com blog? I'm just wanting more of my new site to come up in Google search versus my old blogspot.com site.

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  • "click on a post from that old blogspot, it goes right to my new blog site" - this isn't a sufficient test. It needs to be a "301 HTTP redirect", as opposed to a 302 or JavaScript redirect or meta refresh. "not index my old blogspot.com" - it depends on what it means to "not index" in this context. You certainly don't want to block crawling anytime soon.
    – MrWhite
    Oct 14, 2020 at 22:50

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Setting up 301 Redirects on your old site to the new one is the correct process. You may have inbound links from other sites pointing to the old site, so leaving it in place at this stage is probably a good idea, otherwise those users won't get redirected to your new website.

If you old site has a different domain name to your new site, then it may be useful to check whether any of your old website pages are still indexed on Google. You can do this by searching Google using the site: prefix and your domain name. For example, searching site:domainname.com will give you a list of all pages indexed on your old domain.

Submitting your sitemap is great - that will help.

One other thing you should do is submit a Change of Address in Google Search Console. You can do this if you have your own domain name and also having the same architecture/URLs helps with passing signals to your new site. The Change of Address tool is in Google Search Console under Settings > Change of Address. You can read more about the Change of Address tool here. This also gives you guidance about how long you should leave this setup in place before terminating your old site (180 days).

Hope this helps.

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