Google has updated its site migration guidance to include new information about using Search Console’s change of address tool to move domain names.
The Search Console Change Address Tool
The Google Change Of Address tool is intended to help site owners who are migrating a site from one domain to another domain. The tool helps Google migrate search rankings from the old domain to the new domain.
There are four scenarios in which Google discourages the use of the change of address tool:
1. Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS.
2. Editing category URLs.
3. Migration between WWW and non-WWW.
4. When moving between web hosts or changing CDN providers, but the URLs remain the same.
Updated Tips
The new requirements cover moving from one domain to a new domain. It now recommends including WWW, non-WWW, and subdomain variants, even if they are not used.
THE following recommendations have been added to the guidelines:
“For domain migrations: If you are moving your site from one domain to another, be sure to submit change of address requests for all subdomains and www and non-www variations of the old domain name (for example, from en.example.com, www.example.com, and example.com to new-example.net), even if you are not actively using these variations. Make sure all of these variations are checked in Search Console.”
Screenshot of new requirements
In other words:
- When migrating a website to a new domain, submit a change of address request for each verified version of the old domain.
- Include all subdomains as well as www and non-www versions, even if some are not actively used.
- For example, submit requests for variations such as en.example.com, www.example.com, and example.com when switching to new-example.net.
- Before submitting requests, check all domain variations in Search Console.
Take away
Google added a requirement in its instructions without explaining why it asked users to do so. They forgot to add this key detail. Google’s documentation tends to be a bit sloppy.
For example, one of the changes to the documentation was to correct a sentence that was missing the preposition “about” after the word “decisions.”
“Implement or activate redirections: depending on your decisions, your redirection strategy…”
Here’s how it’s supposed to read:
“Implement or enable redirects: depending on your decisions about your redirection strategy…”
The real reason for the new requirement is their changelog which exists on an entirely different web page.
This is the reason that was excluded from the updated guidelines:
“Domain migrations work best when all variations of a site are successfully migrated.”
The reason is that site migrations from one domain to another work best when all variations are included in the migration process. And the unexplained reason is that the link patterns could cause Google to crawl one of these other variations, which could then introduce search performance issues.
Featured image by Shutterstock/leolintang
