I moved my web site from a shared hosting service to a wordpress.com personal site. However, I soon realised that the posts I had on the old service provider existed on Google search and some of them did not point to the posts published as per their link. The steps below are as per my experience and if you do them, it’s all at your own risk and consequence.
In the above situation, I did the following steps to get the site re-mapped and re-submitted to Google:
Login to wordpress.com site, in my case https://askmeaboutlinux.com.
Click on Tools -> Marketing and select the Traffic tab. Scroll down and find the sitemap.xml path for the wordpress.com site. Note the path down. It is needed to use it when in the Google Search Console to submit the sitemap to Google Search.
Just below that is the section named Site Verification Service. This is where we can enter the HTML tag that Google Search Console generates. This tag helps Google verify the ownership of the web site to be indexed. Stay logged in to the wordpress.com site.
Open the Google Search Console at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. Click on Start Now button and log in using your Google account. Create a Google account, if you do not have one. On the Google Search Console, click on the Add Property option. Next in the URL prefix enter the URL of wordpress.com site, in my case, https://askmeaboutlinux.com and click on Continue. This will add the URL of the site to be indexed by Google Search.
The next step is to verify that you are the real owner of the property i.e. the URL or site. To do this for wordpress.com sites, select the HTML tag method of verification. Once you get the HTML tag (it looks something like this <META name=”google-site-verification”, CONTENT=”blahblahblah-blahblahbalh”>), copy it to clipboard, switch to the wordpress.com site’s administration page (which should be logged in and open), and enter the HTML tag generated by Google Search Console into the Site Verification Services section where Google is shown.
After above is done, Google Search will start indexing the page.
Adding the wordpress.com site map to Google Search Console can be done by selecting the property URL from the Add Property drop down, then expanding index and selecting Sitemaps. Here, the sitemap can be entered as a URL and submitted for indexing.
Now that the sitemap.xml file has been added, the site verified, log out of the wordpress.com account and the Google Search Console. Google will index the site and notify via email when it is successful.
Once the above steps for one URL are complete, repeat them for the other URL combinations such has https, http and www prefixed before the site name.
askmeaboutlinux 