Google tightens domain-migration requirements (SEJ)

Roger Montti for Search Engine Journal, reporting a change to Google’s official Search Console documentation: a domain migration now requires a Change of Address request for every verified variant of the old domain, not just the primary one. Reporting (T3 after the 2026-08-04 re-tiering) on a first-party doc/changelog change — no spokesperson quote; the source is Google’s own developer documentation.

The new requirement

Migrating to a new domain previously meant moving the site you cared about. The tightened guidance says site owners must:

• Submit a separate Change of Address request for every verified version of the old domain;
• Cover all subdomains (e.g. en.example.com) and both www and non-www variants;
• Do so even for variants that aren’t actively used;
• Verify every variant in Search Console first.

So moving to new-example.net means firing change-of-address from example.com, www.example.com, and en.example.com separately. Google’s stated rationale (per the changelog): “Domain migrations work best when all variants of a site are migrated properly” — linking patterns can make Google crawl unused variants, so an unmigrated permutation can leak ranking/indexing problems into the move.

Why it matters here

A traditional technical-SEO operations item, and another instance of the spoke’s “first-party Google guidance is the authoritative surface” thread (google-guidance-seo-authority): the procedure lives in GSC (the Change of Address tool) and Google’s docs, not in third-party folklore. It also rhymes with hyphenated-domains-seo as a domains operational concern, and connects to search-indexation — a botched migration shows up first as variants dropping out of the index.

Related

domain-migration · google-search-console · search-indexation · google-guidance-seo-authority · hyphenated-domains-seo · search-marketing · synthesis