Changed your SEO plugin? Don't forget to move to Google Search Console!

Have you recently been on a quest for a stronger SEO feature, swapping out Yoast in WordPress for Rank Math, or maybe a wave of the opposite operation? This kind of plugin migration is quite common in the circle. However, many people tend to overlook one small detail: the sitemap (Sitemap) The address has mostly changed.

To be honest, if Google's crawlers still stare at that old address and beat around the bush, your new article may have to wait a long time to be searched. It's not hard to solve this problem, we just need to go to the Google Search Console（A simple tweak in the GSC (as it's often called) and the search engines will find the right door.

Move Fast: Handing Google a New Business Card

Once you've confirmed the address of the maps generated by the new plugin, I suggest you tell Google as soon as you can - it's like going to the post office to change your address when you've moved house, lest you get all your mail delivered to your old house.

Find the entrance to the map management

You start by logging into the GSC back office, and in the row of menus on the left, look for "indexing"This piece, click on the" site map ". At this time, you will see a prominent input box in the middle of the page, it says "add a new site map", which is where we have to operate today.

Fill in the new path and submit

Actually, you don't have to copy the whole string of URLs in. You see, the input box already comes with your domain name in front of it, and you only need to copy the small section after it, like the sitemap_index.xml Just fill in the suffix. When you're done, click submit, and you'll see a pop-up window that says Google has received your application. In most cases, as long as the format of your map is not a problem, the background will soon pop up a green "Success", looking quite decompressed.

Don't Leave a Tail: Cleaning Up Old Records That Don't Work

You might think that since the new map has been turned in, it's okay to leave the old one there, right?

Why I suggest you take the initiative to clean up

In fact, there is a concept of "crawl quota" here, Google's crawler has a limited number of times to visit your home every day. If the old map has been hanging in the list, the crawler may still be stupid to take a chance, this is not a waste of energy for no reason? By manually removing links that are no longer working, you're actually helping Google prioritize the new content you have to spend its mind on. That said, it also makes your backend reports look a lot cleaner.

How to remove the old map completely

Look down the list of submitted maps and click on the old address that is no longer used. Once you're on the details page, look for the three vertical dots in the top right corner and click on them to see the option to "Remove sitemap". Click on it and you'll see the "Remove sitemap" option. Don't worry, this will just erase a line in GSC's notebook and won't affect your site's actual rankings at all.

Remember to modify your "Getting Started Guide": robots.txt

After working in the GSC backend, we have to go to the root directory of our website and set up the robots.txt Change a word in the file. This file is the equivalent of your website's greeter, the instruction manual that all search engines must read before entering.

Replace the Sitemap directive inside

You open this file and more than likely you will see a line starting with Sitemap. The code at the beginning. All you have to do is delete that old link after it and replace it with the newly generated address. Granted, the current SEO Plugin(e.g. Rank Math) will mostly take care of the chores for you, but I'm still used to manually checking it all over myself - after all, you can't go wrong with this sort of thing.

Confirm that the changes actually take effect

You can do this by typing directly into your browser's address bar Your domain name/robots.txt Take a look. Once you see the link change with your own eyes, it's pretty much a done deal. You may ask, GSC has been changed, why do we need to move this? Don't forget, there are other platforms in the world besides Google, such as Bing and Baidu, and they are all counting on this file to lead the way.

Two final extra looks: did the capture data really move?

At this point, the operational level is done. However, that doesn't mean you can just be a hands-off.

In my experience, Google doesn't update its index instantly, it usually takes a few days. You can go to the "sitemap" page every now and then to take a look at the "number of pages found". If this number is close to the total number of articles on your site, then the new map is running smoothly. If the number remains static for several days, you may want to check to see if the new address is being blocked by a firewall.

Don't we toss and turn for so long so that every hard-written article can be seen by the world?

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