I am in the process of moving domains I still have alot of visitors coming to old domain (who are familiar with brand) so don't completely want to 301 it, but I would like pages from the old site to get indexed / credited to the new site
Now ideally 301 or rel="canonical"
would be the best bet here but as I mentioned I cant 301 it as for rel="canonical"
it has been well over a month now and it looks like my rel="canonical"
is not getting honoured (even after fetching pages as Google etc) old site pages still shows up in SERPS with the same pages on new site not showing up or showing very very low down the list, heard Google is not big fan of cross domain canonical
SO I am thinking of doing the following...tell me if my theory is flawed:
- Setting all existing pages to
noindex
on old site - This will eventually remove it from Google index, right? Other better ways to get these pages removed except with search console demoting?
- When the old pages have been removed from the index on old domain because the same content exist on new domain the same page on the new domain will now get credited -- on the new domain?
Making sense here? Any Other alternatives?