2

When moving a site to another domain is it a good idea to leave the sitemap.xml in place and not 301'ed to the new site so that google bot has a record of all the links on the old domain and when in crawls them it will follow the 301.

Or is it a better idea to blanket 301 everything including the sitemap.xml from the old site to the new site ?

|improve this question
  • 1
    If you are moving a domain, a sitemap should not be found on your old domain - that would be useless and potentially confusing. Generally, I recommend a blanket redirect (redirect every request as is) from the old domain to the new domain and then any specific redirects, for example, /foo -> /foobar on the new domain. This simply makes life easier and cleaner. Cheers Mate!! – closetnoc Oct 1 '16 at 15:52
  • @closetnoc why you post most of your answer in comment. This one is really acceptable. – Goyllo Oct 2 '16 at 6:38
1

In my experience, it's best to leave the sitemap files in place without any changes. My theory is this gives google a chance to recrawl the list of old urls to find the 301 redirects and update them to the new urls.

This is what I've drawn from doing a couple domain changes and rewrites from http to https on sites with thousands of indexed pages. It might not matter as much for a site with only a couple dozen pages.

|improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.