I've just launched my new site www.pole2polemagazine.com The old site was www.pole2polemagazine.co.uk When a do a site: search for the .com domain it returns nothing. But when I search .co.uk I get a bunch of broken links where the site is not there anymore. The .co.uk domain itself isn't broken as I have redirected it to the .com address. Is it just a case of waiting for google to index my .com domain? And what will happen with the broken .co.uk links will google remove these? As I don't want them to polute my .com results once my .com domain has been indexed. Thanks.
Whomever redirected your old .co.uk site to the .com site ONLY redirected your home page (Terrible). If you try to access any other page on your old site it's getting a 404. This is why it's typically a terrible idea to allow a hosting company to handle your redirects when you change domain names. You would have been better off dropping a .htaccess file in the root of your old web which could have redirected ALL request for ALL pages on the old .co.uk to the same page on the new site (like the ones I suggested yesterday). I would fix this ASAP. If those pages 404 for very long... they'll start dropping out of the index as well. And your new site is ONLY going to get credit for the inbound links to your old home page... not your inner pages. Be very careful if you're depending on your hosting company to do this. They'll likely redirect www.pole2polemagazine.co.uk/* to www.pole2polemagazine.com/ (i.e. they'll likely redirect EVERY page on the old site to the home page on your new site) which is NOT what you want. This is why I suggested the options I did yesterday with the .htaccess files.
've just launched my new site www.pole2polemagazine.com The old site was www.pole2polemagazine.co.uk When a do a site: search for the .com domain it returns nothing. But when I search .co.uk I get a bunch of broken links where the site is not there anymore. The .co.uk domain itself isn't broken as I have redirected it to the .com address. Is it just a case of waiting for google to index my .com domain? And what will happen with the broken .co.uk links will google remove these? As I don't want them to polute my .com results once my .com domain has been indexed. Hi, first off all why did u change it ?? Obviously you've worked to be on Google search... If you want to appear on .com you simply work a bit but no way you give up to .uk ... anyway now you will have to wait until next update...those broken links, there are no problem they are simply files that have been left in AIR... make your new sitemap, check to see if this one has and broken links, and then wait my friend.... Patience, my friend, is a virtue... First you have to
Thanks for the advice guys. The links that are showing 404 errors are all forum posts to a forum that we are no longer using anymore. So I don't really want google displaying them fullstop. This is why I did the redirect this way. The previous site had no work put into it and almost zero traffic. So i am essentially starting the site from scratch not building on the .co.uk Will these deadlinks eventually drop off?
You should use an htaccess redirect so you can redirect all of your pages to the new domain and you can redirect your no longer used pages to the homepage: search engines usually penalise sites returning broken links.
Ok so should I point the DNS for .co.uk back to the old site and then include a .htacess folder in that sites root dir?