Your old site is still showing up in Google

You moved, or you changed your prices, or you rebuilt the site from scratch. The new one is live. And people keep finding the old one anyway — turning up at an address you left two years ago, quoting a price you retired, asking for whoever ran the place before you. Your old site is still showing up in Google, and every day that carries on costs you customers. The person who rang a dead number rang someone else straight after.

Two very different things cause this, and they need two very different fixes. Start with the check that takes a minute.

Your old site is still showing up in Google — check whether it is actually still there

Open a private or incognito window and type the old address in by hand rather than clicking it from Google. Private matters: your own browser may be showing you a copy it saved months ago.

• It loads normally. The old site is still live, and somebody is still paying to keep your out-of-date details online.
• You get an error, or nothing at all. It is gone, and Google is behind.

Everything below depends on which of those you got.

The quickest win is your own Google listing

Do this one first whichever case you are in, because it is entirely yours to fix. Open your Google Business Profile and look at the website link. If it still points at the old address, Google is sending people there on your behalf — including the people searching for your name specifically. That field gets missed a lot during a rebuild. While you are in there, check the phone number and the opening hours.

You can only edit it if the profile is verified and you are listed as an owner or a manager. If it is still sitting in someone else's account, that is your next phone call. More on that in getting found on Google in your own town and hours and contact details that win customers.

If the old site still loads, you are competing with yourself

Two copies of your business are now in the running, and Google has to pick one. It often picks the old one: it has been around longer, more links point at it, more people have clicked it. Your new site is losing to your own back catalogue.

Google's side is a dead end here. While the old page is live and nothing on it is false, it is a legitimate result, and Google's public outdated-content form only does anything once the content has actually been removed or changed. So the job is getting into the old site. Three trails:

1. The renewal invoice. Fastest, and easy to overlook. Search your email for "renewal", "invoice" or "hosting", then check card statements for a small charge that turns up once a year. It carries a company name, and that company is the one you need.
2. The domain record. Every domain has a public record, but the owner's name is usually redacted or sitting behind a privacy service, so you probably will not see a person. It almost always still names the registrar — the company the domain is booked through, like GoDaddy, Namecheap or IONOS. That is the thread to pull. More in who actually owns your domain.
3. The person who built it. The nephew, the freelancer who went quiet, the agency that stopped answering. A polite email often ends the hunt in one reply.

What to ask for once you are in

The right move is a permanent redirect. Anyone opening an old address lands on the matching new page, and Google reads it as a permanent move. You do not need to write code. Send your host or web person this:

Can you put a permanent 301 redirect on oldsite.com pointing to newsite.com? Please map each old page to its closest match on the new site, rather than pointing the whole domain at the homepage.

That last part is the part people drop. Dump everything on the homepage and your old services page throws away years of accumulated credit instead of handing it to the new one. Worse, someone who searched for one specific job lands on your front door, sees nothing about what they wanted, and goes back to Google.

Switching the old site off looks tidier and costs you more: the old addresses go dead, and everything they earned evaporates.

If it is already gone, Google is just slow

Nothing is broken. Google does not visit every page every day, and a listing can take days or weeks to catch up.

You can nudge it. The public outdated-content form is built for exactly this — the page has changed or gone, but the result still shows the old version. You do not need to own the site to use it, but the change does have to be live already.

There is also a Removals tool inside Search Console, and it is worth knowing what that one really is. If the old site sits in a Search Console property you have verified as owner, you can hide a result there even while the page is still live and unchanged. Google documents it as a stopgap lasting about six months, for buying time while you arrange the permanent fix. If the old site is not yours to verify, that door is shut and you are back to finding the host.

This week

1. Search your own business name and read page one honestly. What are customers actually seeing?
2. Open the old address in a private window. Loads? It is live. Error? Google is just catching up.
3. Fix the website link and phone number on your Business Profile.
4. If the old site is live: dig out the renewal invoice, find the host, send the redirect request above.
5. Search again a fortnight later and check the old result has dropped.

Worth saying plainly: there is no agency anywhere in this, ours included. It is one email and ten minutes in a Google listing. We build websites for a living, so we have an obvious stake in telling you otherwise, which is exactly why we would rather say it out loud. And whoever built your new site should have handled the redirect as part of the move. Ask them to show you it works.