What happens to my soloist.ai link after I connect a custom domain?

When you connect a custom domain to your Solo website, your original soloist.ai/<handle> link doesn't disappear but we change how search engines see it.

Your soloist.ai/handle link stays live

You can still type or share your soloist.ai/<handle> link and it will load your site, just like before. We keep it accessible in case you ever disconnect your custom domain, you will still be able to access your soloist.ai address.

What changes for Google and other search engines

While the link stays reachable for anyone who has it, we hide it from search engines in three ways:

• Noindex meta tag — we add a tag to the soloist.ai/<handle> page that tells Google and other crawlers not to include it in their index.
• Canonical tag points to your custom domain — this tells search engines that your custom domain is the "real" address for the page. Any SEO signals (links pointing in, ranking history) accrue to the custom domain, not the soloist.ai URL.
• Removed from the sitemap — your soloist.ai/<handle> URL is taken out of our sitemap, so search engines aren't pointed at it for crawling.

The result: from a search engine perspective, your custom domain is the only visible version of your site. The soloist.ai/<handle> URL is invisible to Google and others but will still work for anyone who types it directly. Note, if your soloist.ai/<handle> link is already indexed, it will eventually disappear from the Google index.