Technical SEO setup for a newly acquired domain

Pick one canonical hostname

Decide immediately whether the site lives with or without www, and on HTTPS only. Then make every other variant redirect to it with a single permanent hop. Chained redirects waste crawl budget and dilute the signals you are trying to consolidate.

• http → https, one redirect.
• Non-canonical host → canonical host, one redirect.
• No redirect chains longer than one hop.
• Self-referencing canonical tag on every indexable page.

Control what gets indexed

Serve a robots.txt that allows the public site and blocks account, admin and API paths. Keep noindex for genuinely private pages only — a stray sitewide noindex is the most common reason a new site never appears in search at all.

Ship a real sitemap

A sitemap should list every canonical, indexable URL and nothing else. Excluded pages, redirects and 404s inside a sitemap teach crawlers that the file is unreliable. Reference it from robots.txt and submit it once in your search console.

Make the first crawl cheap

Crawlers form an early impression of how expensive your site is to fetch. Compress responses, cache static assets aggressively, avoid render-blocking scripts and make sure every page returns the correct status code. Fast, honest responses get crawled more often.

Set up measurement before content

Connect a search console property and analytics before publishing, so you have a clean baseline from day one. Without it, you cannot tell whether a change helped, and you lose the early coverage reports that reveal indexing problems while they are still small.

Frequently asked

www or no www — does it matter for ranking?

The choice itself does not affect ranking. Serving both without a redirect does, because it splits signals across two hostnames.

How long until a new domain is indexed?

Usually days to a few weeks. Submitting a sitemap and earning a few real links from already-crawled sites is the fastest reliable accelerator.