: What are the best SEO practices when changing domain names? I'm using the Yoast SEO plugin on a WordPress site on a new, more memorable domain to replace an old static HTML site with no SEO.

@Carla537

It sounds like you've Google's guidelines for moving a site (301 redirects, filing Change of Address in Google Search Console, upload new XML sitemaps, etc). That's great!

The issue that you're encountering is "URLs from the old domain still appear in Google search results, not URLs from my new domain".

Your old URLs are likely to remain visible in Google SERPs for several weeks, and it could be as long as several months. This is not a problem.

Google has lots of historical data about your old domain, and virtually none about your new domain. Since you've filed Change of Address, Google is now in the process of transferring authority and trust signals from your old domain to your new domain. This process takes time.

New URLs will begin to replace old URLs gradually, once Google has done all the recursive calculations that confirm that, in fact, your new URLs are the canonical destination for your content. Nothing to worry about.

Run a spider like Screaming Frog against your old site to confirm that all your 301 redirects are pointing where they should be, and wait it out.

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@Lee4591628

Yeah, "after a few days" isn't much time at all for a small site. It sounds like you've done what you need to do and are just in the waiting phase.

The one thing you didn't mention was using the Fetch as Google feature in Search Console. That can be used to ask Google to crawl and index your URLs.

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