An SEO professional was curious about a website migration.
What do they do if they want to migrate the content of one website to two separate domains and split it?
What should they do for the old domain in Search Console? Which domain should they point as a recipient, and how do they properly notify Google of this migration?
John explained that when you’re splitting or merging websites, you can’t use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.
This tool relies on the fact that the move is a one to one move from one domain to another domain.
As soon as you’re splitting or merging websites, then it’s not a one-to-one move any longer.
That’s something that has to be processed on a per URL basis.
So, for these situations, what you want to do is set up the redirects properly and follow the normal guidelines that Google has for site moves.
Keep in mind that the Search Console setting will try and test some sample pages on your site for that redirect.
It may also be that it looks like everything is okay.
But John thinks it would still be wrong to use that setting if you’re splitting a website up, just because it would potentially mess up signals a bit.
John doubts that it would really cause problems.
This happens at approximately the 38:37 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 38:37
We want to migrate the content of one website to two separate domains and basically split it. What should we do in the old domain Search Console? Which domain should we point as a recipient? How do we notify Google?
John (Answer) 38:50
So in any case like this, where you’re splitting or merging websites, you can’t use the Change of Address tool in Search Console, because it relies on the fact that the move is a one to one move from one domain to another domain.
And as soon as you’re splitting or merging websites, then that’s not a one to one move anymore. That’s essentially kind of something that has to be processed on a per URL basis.
So for these kinds of things, essentially, what you want to do is just set up redirects properly and kind of follow the normal guidelines that we have for site moves. And just kind of keep in mind that the Search Console setting for change of address is probably not suitable there.
Also, the Search Console setting will try to test some sample pages on your site for that redirect. And it might be that it looks like everything is okay.
But I think it would still be wrong to use that setting if you’re splitting a website up, just because it could potentially mess up signals a little bit. I doubt that it would really cause problems.
But I don’t think you would have any advantage of using that kind of change of address tool, if you’re not actually moving from one domain to another.
