Google Launched its Newest Webmaster Tools Feature

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/mCp8i)
‘Change of Address’ is the newest feature of Google Webmaster Tools as announced by Google. Since the internet is a constantly changing community, some webmasters move their domain names. With the new feature, webmasters can instantly inform Google of the changes.

Once you use the feature of the Webmaster Tools, Google will automatically renew the index to show your latest URL. Such change will be seen within 180 days; by that time, Google has already crawled to the new URL and indexed the site’s pages. If you want to access the newest feature offered by Google, you need to log in to the Webmaster Tools and go to ‘site configuration’. You need to select the ‘change of address’ section. There you can find the detailed instructions for changing the address.

To set up your new site, you need to review the Webmaster Tools’ guidelines for moving a websites to new domains. After that, you should set up the contents on the new domain. All your existing internet links should point to the new address.

Since your site visitors are familiar with your old address, you need to redirect all the traffic to the new address. You can use ‘301 redirect’ so that you can permanently redirect all the pages of the old website to the new one. Users will instantly know that your website has moved. You also need to request webmasters to renew links respectively so that the links will now point to the latest address. Using 302 redirects, incoming links to the old website will also be automatically redirected to the new site.

You must not forget to add the new website to Google Webmasters Tools. You also need to verify the new domain and inform Google of your domain’s URL.

Once you’ve submitted the address change, you will need to check Webmaster Tools periodically so that you will know if Google has already crawled to your new website and indexed it. For those with sitemaps, you can check it by looking into the Sitemap details to determine the number of crawled pages and those that are indexed.

Check the ‘moving your name’ that Google posted. It is a help document that can aid you and other webmasters out there in completing the process. A lot of site owners have waited for this feature for several years now and finally, it was launched by Google.

Nothing is permanent on the web. Some webmasters are hesitant to move their websites to a different domain because they fear that their rankings will be greatly affected. There are ways to make the transition much easier for you and the users. If you’re simply redesigning or rebranding, you can move your site first and then launch the redesign. As mentioned earlier, you can use ‘301 redirect’ so that all your site’s pages are permanently redirected to the new one. Don’t leave off your old website and instead, try to control it for another 180 days.

Changing to a new address is no longer a problem. Just follow the instructions on the Google Webmaster Tools.