We have a question from Giacomo in Parma, Italy, who asks, what is the benefit of using the change of address tool inthe Google Webmaster console compared to just setting up the required 301 redirections to the new site?
And why should I renew the change of address notification every 180 days?
Can't I just leave the 301 in place?
Really?
Good question.
Certainly, you can leave the 301 in place, but there are a couple of differences between the change of address formand three or one redirects.
The first one and the biggest one is that the change of address form is at the site level, whereas three and one redirectsare at the page level.
So, for example, what if you move one directory to anotherdirectory? You could do a 301 on every page in that directory, and we'd eventually learn to go to the pages in the new directory.
But it can be hard to interpret whether that applies to the entire site or just to that specific directory.
The change of address form very unambiguously says this site right here is moving to this site right here.
The other thing is, 301 redirects can take a little bit of time to go into effect.
Change of address form whenever you fill that out and submit that to us, gets that information to us immediately, so we don't have to try to interpret.
Okay, are we seeing a lot of 301 redirects?
No, we have the intent of the Webmaster right there, and they're saying, you know what?
I am moving from site A to site B.
Please transfer over any reputation and whatever stuff you can over to the new site.
Now, the change of address form is not perfect, but it is very useful, and I think it's much better than what we had before, which was just three or one redirects, so I would use both.
It certainly doesn't hurt to use both, and not every search engine has a change of address form.
In fact, I think Google is the only one that has a change of address form.
So what I would do is if you're moving from site A to site B, I would fill out a change of address form, and then I would also do three or one redirects that point from the certain pages on site A to the corresponding pages on site B, and then that will help the transition go as smoothly as possible if everything is going well.
For example, when I did 301 from Dulles dot com to Mattcuts. Com because I'd moved there and then I moved back.
It didn't take very long for those three or ones to go intoeffect where the entire site was moved over within Google's Index.
So if three or ones are working fine for you and 180 days has passed, maybe you don't need to worry about filling out the change of address form again, but if you want to be safe and you still control both sites.
It certainly doesn't hurt to say you know what?
Yes.
This site has still moved to this site over here.
So the main difference is that it's a site wide tool as opposed to a page tool.
But it's also very helpful for you to tell us explicitly.
Yes, I am moving my site as opposed to us trying to guess because search engines can sometimes get that wrong.
Thanks.