GWT Change of Address Keeps Failing
-
Followed Google's instructions for using the Change of Address Tool in GWT to move rethinkisrael.org to www.fromthegrapevine.com. I'm getting this message, "We tried to reconfirm ownership of your old site (rethinkisrael.org) and failed. Make sure your verification token is present, and try again."Even though the site is verified, we undid the DNS change, and checked the meta verification tag. The tag is correct. And, since the site is ALREADY verified there was NO way to 'veryify' in GWT again. The message in GWT says "verification successful."We redid the DNS change, tried again to do the address change and get the same error message. Any ideas?
-
Hi Aggie,
Sorry that you're experiencing problems with your migration.
My first thought was that you need to make sure you've verified non-www and www for both the old domain and the new one. It sounds like you may have done this?
What verification method did you use to verify your old domain?
I found a thread in the Google Webmaster forums which mentions using a different verification method (DNS record on both domains) and that seemed to fix the problem. Here is the thread:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/2BC36MTFIm4
Let us know if that helps!
Paddy
-
Lisa,
I am going to try and assist you. I will follow up when I have an answer. Give me a day or two. Sorry,
Robert
-
Tried that too.
-
Robert we tried everything. We had both www and non www verified, and and set the preferred domain to www.
During this ridiculous exercise we went back and verified both, redid the redirects and tried the process all over and keep getting the same error.
Thanks for trying.
Lisa
-
Aggie,
I see the G Verification meta in the old site as of June 27th, 2014. I would go on the WMT forum and the fifth item down is verification. Ask your question on there and you will likely get what you need. I have done a lot of change of addresses and not run into the problem.
One question is did you have a preferred domain for the old site (non-www or www)? I noticed that the old site is without WWW and the new is with. If the preferred domain was without, be sure you put the old in as no www and try that.Let us know what you find if no one here has a good answer.
Best
-
I guess Google needs to confirm that you own both sites when you do the URL change. When you ask for a change of address, as you edited the DNS records, the old Website no longer exists and cannot be verified.
Can you keep both Websites alive at the same time? I mean, leave the site up at rethinkisrael.org and also at www.fromthegrapevine.com, both at the same time (that shouldn't be too hard) and then try the Change of Address again. Once completed, you can remove or 301 the old rethinkisrael.org
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Doudle URLs without Canonical link and a change in keyword.: What are the effects on SEO?
I built my new website and i have two major worries. 1. My home page has two URLs. The one with a high PA though indexed by Google, is not submitted in the sitemap. I tried to place a canonical tag but the hosting service said it was impossible for me to place the canonical link. My concern is if the indexed page will be successfully optimized for SEO without it being submitted in the sitemap and what happens to the other URL for the same page which is also indexed and submitted in the sitemap? 2.I started my link building campaign for one of my pages. I acquired some good PA already for a particular keyword but later on discovered it will be very difficult for me to rank for the major keyword. I have decided to change the keyword. Will the acquired PA influence the SEO for the new keyword? I wish to know if i should dissolve the links to the page for the former keyword or should i maintain them and move forward with building links for the new keyword as well.
Technical SEO | | trevordocs0 -
Changing Domains - 301 old https to new https
Brief History: Our company made change to a new domain. Both domains had an SSL configured on it in which the old domain SSL was controlled and created by Shopify which gave us limited control. Because we couldn't redirect the old https:// to the new https:// So basically we duplicated our new HTML website and put canonical ref on all duplicate pages to the final domain to help get search to navigate to the newer domain. Question: In the near future I would like to take down the old domain and do a 301 domain forwarding. What is the correct course of action to complete this? Our old domain was indexed and SERP results were tied to it's https:// url's.
Technical SEO | | bnewt1 -
Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?
Hi Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Does google know every time you change content on your page
What i mean by the question is, so on our home page www.in2town.co.uk we change the article under lifestyle story of the day, if this changes every hour, will this encourage google to visit that page more often or will then just ignore that and just visit each day would love to hear your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Should I change a 301 redirect?
I recently moved all the content from an old site to a new site on a new domain. I lost a significant amount of traffic as a result. There are 301 redirects for every page on the old site. Generally, these point to the same content as was on the relevant page of the old site. However, the 301 redirect for the homepage on the old site points to the homepage on the new site, not to the content from the old site homepage. I'm wondering whether to change the 301 to point at the content from the old site homepage. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | seqal0 -
Problems with changing the page title on Wordpress Site...
The website is http://www.masterpieceinteriors.co.uk/ I'm not sure why the homepage title is reading 'masterpieces' in Google but looks fine here. There seem to be 2 versions of the homepage coming up in google - you can see them both by searching 'masterpieceinteriors' and then 'masterpiece interiors'. Some help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Opiyo0 -
Which is more accurate? site: or GWT?
when viewing urls in google's index, is it more accurate to refer to site:www.domain.com or google webmaster tools (urls in web index)?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860