throwaway25239

It's the second one.

Most of my previous traffic was from direct searches for the name of the software, so I think I'll try the social media approach - thanks!

So the old domain should have the same content as the new one? Right now, I have blank pages on the old domain with a canonical link and a redirect. I could try duplicating the content, but it seems like having duplicate content might cause Google to penalize me even further?

Bing/DDG has the site indexed correctly, and I get a decent amount of traffic from them, but Google's market share is large enough that it's not really feasible to just ignore them.

(And I'm not buying ads on either one, this is about organic ranking)

The old domain was a *.github.io domain (which I migrated to a custom domain), so I don't think it's possible to use my own server for it.

Google did pick up the relationship correctly, at least in the beginning - the new domain got the same ranking as the old one, and the "backlinks" section of the search console shows links to the old domain under the property information for the new domain. So it seems like this type of redirect does have an effect, unless it somehow expires after a few months and a 301 redirect doesn't?

Yes.

I think I actually read your post earlier when I was trying to figure this out, so thanks for that! The symptoms do seem pretty similar, although the fact that the timeframe is different makes me think it's a different issue.

> There are some Google people on Twitter responding to concerns such as yours. @JohnMu is one of them. You can send a private message to him about it.

Thanks! I'll try that if I can't find a solution.

Thanks for the suggestions. I think those 4 all look OK. The site content is purely static HTML (and some images) that hasn't changed significantly in months, so I'm guessing that's not the issue.

I'd rather not post the site URL here; is it OK if I email you?

The old site was hosted on Github Pages, so there isn't a way to do a server-side redirect AFAIK, but I replaced each page on the old site with a client-side redirect in the following format:

    <link rel="canonical" href="new page URL" />
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=new page URL">