Google Adds Change of Address To Notify Google Of Domain Change

Jun 10, 2009 at 4:58pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools named change of address. This feature allows webmasters to notify Google when they move domain names.

When used, Google will update the index to reflect your new URL. The change will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time Google would have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL. To access this feature, login to Webmaster Tools and under “site configuration” select “change of address.” Then follow the instructions, which currently read:

Set up the new site: Review our guidelines for moving your site to a new domain. Set up your content on your new domain, then make sure all internal links point to the new domain.
Redirect all traffic from the old site: Use a 301 redirect to permanently redirect the pages on your old site to your new site. This tells users and search engines that your site has permanently moved. Ask webmasters to update their links to point to your new domain and make sure incoming links to your old site are redirected correctly using the 301 redirects.
Add your new site to Webmaster Tools: Make sure you have added and verified your new domain.
Tell us the URL of your new domain
After submitting the change of address, check your Webmaster Tools data periodically to see if your new site has been crawled and indexed (if you have a Sitemap, one way to determine this is by checking Sitemap details for the new site to see how many of the pages have been crawled and indexed).

In addition, Google posted a help document on moving your domain to aid webmasters with this process. Below is a picture of that screen:

This is a feature we have been wanting since at least early 2006, but even before then.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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2 COMMENTS ON Google Adds Change of Address To Notify Google Of Domain Change

Cohn, June 11th, 2009 at 11:51 am ET:

I was initially happy to learn of this new Google change of address service because I had upgraded my Cohn.Wordpress.com blog (a Wordpress.com subdomain) on January 29, 2009 via Wordpress.com’s service called Domain Mapping – http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/
and thought it might shorten what has turned out to be a six month domain name change “penalty” in Google.

Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it.

134 days later not only is my original Wordpress.com blog not getting new posts indexed in Google after I upgraded, neither is my mapped domain – SearchMarketingCommunications.com getting indexed which effectively ended all of my Google search referrals.
Both Yahoo and Live – now Bing have been crawling and indexing the new domain for several months.

I thought Google’s new change of address service might shave some of the roughly 46 days remaining before my site gets put back in their index – but no such luck.

According to their help page: “In addition, make sure your original site is not a subdomain (for example, http://newsite.example.com).”

Provided I have read this correctly – Wordpress subdomains and Wordpress Domain Mapping aren’t supported by Google’s new change of address service.

If someone could explain why Wordpress.com subdomains aren’t supported or when I could hope to see my old blog and its new domain back in Google again I’d appreciate it.

nickstamoulis, June 12th, 2009 at 9:00 pm ET:
Premium member since 06/2009

This is excellent information, thanks for the heads up on this new feature! I have been in situations where this would have made the process of moving to a new domain much easier and more streamlined.

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