Google Tightens Requirements For Domain Migrations

Google updated their site migration guidance to include new information about using the Search Console Change of Address tool for moving domain names.

The Search Console Change of Address Tool

Google Change Of Address tool is for helping site owners who are migrating a site from one domain to another domain. The tool helps Google to migrate search rankings from the old domain to the new domain.

There are four scenarios where Google discourages the use of the Change of Address tool:

1. Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS.

2. Changing category URLs.

3. Migrating between WWW and non-WWW.

4. When moving between web hosts or changing CDN provider but the URLs remain the same.

Updated Guidance

The new requirements cover moving from one domain to a new domain. It now recommends including the WWW, non-WWW, and subdomain variants, even if they’re not being used.

The following recommendations were added to the guidelines:

“For domain migrations: If you’re moving your site from one domain to another, make sure to submit Change of Address requests for all subdomains and the www and non-www variants of the old domain name (for example, from en.example.com, www.example.com, and example.com to new-example.net), even if you’re not actively using these variants. Ensure that you have all of these variants verified 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 every verified version of the old domain.
• Include all subdomains as well as both the www and non-www versions, even if some are not actively used.
• For example, submit requests for variants such as en.example.com, www.example.com, and example.com when moving to new-example.net.
• Before submitting the requests, verify all domain variants in Search Console.

Takeaway

Google added a requirement in their guidance without explaining the reason for asking users to do it. They forgot to add that key detail. Google’s documentation tends to be a little sloppy.

For example, one of the changes to the documentation was to fix a sentence that’s missing the preposition “about” after the word “decisions. ”

“Implement or turn on the redirects: depending on your decisions your redirect strategy…”

This is how it’s supposed to read:

“Implement or turn on the redirects: depending on your decisions about your redirect strategy…”

The actual reason for the new requirement is in their Changelog that exists on an entirely different web page.

This is the reason that was left out of the updated guidance:

“The domain migrations work best when all variants of a site are migrated properly.”

The reason then is that site migrations from one domain to another work best when all the variants are included as  part of the migration process. And the unexplained reason for that is because linking patterns might cause Google to crawl one of these other variants which could then introduce search performance issues.

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