During a hangout, an SEO professional asked John Mueller about a website migration from a subdomain to a main domain.
They work in retail online publishing. It’s a site that has been around for at least 25 years. So, it’s a pretty old website.
Their main question is about migrating from a subdomain to the main domain, which is a recurring question in John’s hangouts.
However, in this professional’s case, they are concerned about this because for this migration, this subdomain has 20 or 40 years behind it and it isn’t a recent or new subdomain.
They are concerned whether they will benefit from this migration or not.
And this subdomain section is about news that involves politics, daily life, public health policy, etc.
John answered that doing this is possible. But it’s important, when you’re moving different parts of a site to the main domain, such as moving a subdomain to the main domain or a subdomain to a different directory, to understand that Google has to look at the new website overall in order to re-evaluate the situation.
This means that it’s difficult to know ahead of time exactly what will happen.
If you move from one domain to a different domain, then it’s easy for their systems to say “Take everything here and just copy it over there.”
But, if you’re moving from a subdomain to a main domain, you’re merging different parts of a website.
And your final outcome (whether you have increased rankings and traffic or not) will depend on your final site structure.
John also stressed that while these changes are possible, you have to watch out and make sure that you do them reasonably.
He recommends making sure that you have a very clear mapping of your old website to the new one. And then really checking the old URLs, to make sure they are moved properly, and then double-check by crawling the main domain again separately.
Just to really make sure that your new website structure is okay, and that all of those pages can be found.
It could take approximately two weeks or so until things from the migration settle down.
This happens at approximately the 45:08 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 7 45:08
I work in retail online publishing. It’s a website that has been around for at least 25 years. It’s an old website. And my question is about migration, subdomain to domain. It’s a recurrent question here. But in my case, we are concerned about this because this migration, this subdomain has 20, 40 years and it isn’t a recent or a new subdomain.
And we are concerned if we benefit from this migration. Yeah. Because this is the main important section. The subdomain is a more important section website about news that involves politics, daily life, public health policy. And for this, we are concerned about this migration in this case. Yeah.
John 46:28
Okay, and you’re migrating from a subdomain to a different domain or to a subdirectory?
SEO Professional 7 46:38
The same directory.
John 46:44
Okay. So to a different subdomain, from one subdomain to another subdomain?
SEO Professional 7 46:50
No, no, no. It’s the subdomain to the main domain.
John 46:53
Okay. Okay. Um, I, I think you can do this. So let me see. The, I think one of the aspects here, that is, is important when you’re moving from a subdomain to the main domain to a different directory, for example, is that we need to look at the new website overall, and kind of reevaluate the overall situation. And that means that it’s hard to know ahead of time, what exactly will happen.
And it’s something where you can kind of use your knowledge and your experience to, to figure out a little bit what possibly could happen. But it’s hard to know exactly. Because if you move from one domain to a different domain, then it’s easy for our systems to say, Take everything here and just copy it over here.
But if you move from a subdomain to a main domain, you’re essentially merging different parts of a website. And that kind of final outcome that you have will depend on your final structure. So whoops, I think overall, it’s something where you can do these kinds of changes, but you kind of have to watch out that you do them in a reasonable way.
And what I would recommend doing here is making sure that you have a very clear mapping of your old website to the new one. And then really checking all of those old URLs. You can use their various tools to test that, but really make sure that everything is moved properly, and then double-check by crawling the main domain, again, separately to make sure that really your new website structure is okay.
And all of the pages can be found. And for the most part, I assume that that will be fine. And I mean, it’s possible to make other mistakes as well. But those are usually the more common types of issues. I don’t know what I would recommend in terms of how long this will take or what the final effect will be.
I suspect, maybe you’ll see an effect for a couple of weeks until things settle down. But it should, should be possible. If you’re a Google News Publisher, then I would also make sure that you contact whoever on the Google News site that is kind of appropriate for you. In the Help Center for Google news publishers.
There’s also a contact form just to let them know that you’re moving from this set of URLs to a different set of URLs. Sometimes they need to make some changes in the Publisher Center or I don’t know all of the details there.
But just have to make sure that they’re aware of this as well. But otherwise for search itself, making that move, making sure everything is lined up is essentially what you need to do.
