Google’s John Mueller: how to reverse a move to a new website URL structure

“So I guess they set up a redirect from the old site to a new site and now they want to go back to the old site again.

In general, this is something that might might be a bit tricky on on our side. So what I would recommend doing is redirecting back at least. So that from the old site, or from the site that you initially redirected to, we see a redirect back to your preferred version.

So that anytime we crawl the version that we found from the initial redirect we can get back to the version that you actually do want to have indexed.

That’s the first step that I would do there, like you would with any other site move. And then just from there follow the the general guidelines with regards to site moves. And in particularly trying to make sure that all of the external signals are aligned with where you want your site to be placed as well.

So things like external links, internal links, sitemaps, canonicals on these pages, everything aligned with the URLs that you do want.

Sometimes this works fairly well, sometimes it’s a bit tricky depending on how long you’ve been redirecting to the other site. So wish you luck, I guess.

Anytime you do a site move it’s a bit of, it can be a bit tricky. And if you have to do a site move one way and then you redo that and redirect back again, it makes it tricky as well. So sometimes you just need to be patient for everything to settle down properly too.