New Domain Names - Part 6:
Old Domain Expiring Soon

In part 6 of this series of articles I look at how the deindexing of old sites and indexing of new sites is progressing.

Recap

In the previous article in this series, New Domain Names - Part 5: Site Move, I submitted the final change of address requests in Google Webmaster Tools for my old domains, and I finally ceased using CloudFlare completely.

With less than a week to go until my .com expires it is time to evaluate how the deindexing progress is coming along.

Google Webmaster Tools: Index Status

Over the last 12 months I have gradually transitioned content from my old domains to my new domains. The first major shift was in the when I shifted from watfordjc.com to web.watfordjc.co.uk as a result of Heartbleed (and StartSSL charging for revocations meaning I just ditched the old www sub-domains).

As can be seen in the graphs from Google Webmaster Tools, JohnCook.UK went live around at which point a reduction in the number of indexed pages at WatfordJC.com can be seen as Google started following the first of the cross-domain redirects.

The Transition

At the time of writing the first article in this series, New Domain Names, the plan of the transition was put in writing, including the plan for moving all my e-mail addresses to unique per-contact addresses @JohnCook.co.uk.

In New Domain Names - Part 2: Moving URLs I covered the various redirects needed (according to what Google had in its index) for the site move. The majority of those old URLs are no longer in Google's index.

On I wrote about search engine optimisation (SEO) in New Domain Names - Part 3: Googlebot and the Google Index, as well as covering HTML5 sectioning elements, redirecting to the canonical domains and briefly touching on rich snippets and Microdata.

Those 3 articles, combined with my article HTML5, Microdata, and Rich Snippets—and part 4 of this series plus several other posts in my Website Blog—together resulting in the current situation of most of the content from my old domains being transitioned and almost every page on the new sites being indexed by Google.

Further Plans

While keeping my eye on the deindexing of the old Web sites and ensuring Google indexes everything it is permitted to on the new sites, I am also making small incremental changes to the site.

A recent example of such a change was updating the Network Status page to show the live status of my systems such as Web, mail, and phone.

Something else I am currently considering is adding Google Custom Search Engine to the site. That will take time to implement, however, as it would involve Google re-indexing many pages so the newest Microdata is indexed.

Without re-indexing, a lot of pages Google has in its index won't be useable with some advanced (based on Microdata) search options I'd like to have, although I have yet to work out how to implement them.

Over time the site will be refined and built upon, hopefully culminating in the hub of my online presence that I set out to create.