How To Change Your Address (For Google’s Sake)
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 Leave a comment
One really cool tool that few people know about is Google’s change of address tool. This is a tool you can use to notify Google that your website has changed addresses. You could just use your robots.txt or .htaccess file to redirect your old site to your new site, but that can often be sloppy. With the change of address tool you can do it through Webmaster Central much more easily. The downside is that it won’t necessarily work for other search engines.
You have to make sure that both your old address and your new address are verified in Google’s Webmaster Central. After you’ve done that, log into Webmaster Central and choose your old site address. Go to Site Configuration and select Change of Address. Follow the guides and when you get to Step 4 you’ll be given to the option to Select a verified site. Select your new address from the list.
There’s just one caveat here: You can’t redirect to a subdomain. If you are moving your old site to a subdomain then you’ll have to do that through .htaccess or robots.txt, but I don’t know why you’d do that.
Again, this method of address change might work to refocus your Google rankings to your new website address, but you’ll still have rankings for your old site at the other search engines until they crawl your new site so it’s not an altogether useful tool. The best application I can think of is to use it to ensure that your new website is crawled faster by Google and indexed quicker. But you’ll still need the robots.txt or .htaccess to notify other search engines of your change. The benefit to the change of address tool is that the change will happen sooner at Google than it otherwise would.
Leave a comment Category: Search Engines
Read similar posts in Search Engines
- Bing Gets Serious About Link Building
- Google Predictions Video by Matt Cutts
- The State of Google's Index
- Is Google Quietly Tweaking Local Search
- Are You Ready For Some Caffeine?
Subscribe to our RSS feed
No comments yet.
Subscribe to our RSS Feed 
