Google search console’s address tool update to help you move your site

Google has rolled out some new features for the search console’s change of address tool to help users with changing domains.

This new change in address tool within the search console allows the website owners to introduce Google when their website moves from one domain to another. Doing this helps Google to prioritize crawling and indexing the new domain instead of the old one. Submitting a change in the address to Google Console will also be helpful for Google to forward signals from the old to new domain.

To make this tool more useful for the site owners, here are the two new features added by Google:

Redirect Validation

A major component of any domain change is setting up 301 redirects from the old URLs to new URLs. This tool shows you the redirect flow as well as suggest some examples also to give you a recommendation of any redirect problems.

Have a look at the image below shown by Google to get a clear idea:

Reminder

After the domain request has been submitted, Google search console will remind you for the same whenever you log in to the dashboard of the moving domain or destination domain. Although, Google takes the time of up to 180 days to complete the redirection process and that’s why this reminder will be there throughout the entire process.

Check out the screenshot by Google:

In the end, it is worth to note that this change in address tool is a part of only domain changing process. Moreover, site owners need to implement 301 redirects for the homepage and all the canonical pages.