Google — Site move with URL changes (Search Central doc)
Google’s first-party reference for moving a site to a new domain (or new URLs) while keeping its ranking and indexing intact. The canonical procedure behind domain-migration and the all-variants requirement reported in google-domain-migration-requirements.
Key facts
- Change of Address tool, every variant. Submit a Change of Address in Search Console for the old site, and “make sure to submit Change of Address requests for all subdomains and the www and non-www variants of the old domain name … even if you’re not actively using these variants.” All variants must be verified in Search Console first.
- HTTP→HTTPS is exempt. “If you’re moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS, you don’t need to use the Change of Address tool.”
- Permanent server-side redirects. Use
301/308: “301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.” Avoid redirect chains — keep them “ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5.” - Keep redirects ~1 year. “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year” — the window Google needs to “transfer all signals to the new URLs, including recrawling and reassigning links on other sites that point to your old URLs.”
- Timeline. A small-to-medium site “can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer.”
- Change one thing at a time — move all URLs together rather than sectioning the migration.
Tier
T1 — primary first-party Google Search Central documentation.
Related
domain-migration · google-domain-migration-requirements · google-search-console · search-indexation · google-search-essentials