Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Concept
Moving a site to new URLs or a new domain, with redirects and Search Console's Change of Address tool.
Documented in
Google's site move guide says not to redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant destination such as the new site's home page, which can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404, and to return a 404 or 410 for deleted or merged content that is not moved to the new site.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
Google's site move guide says to submit a Change of Address in Search Console when moving from one domain or subdomain to another, to submit the new sitemap, and to change internal links on the new site from the old URLs to the new ones.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
Google's site move guide says to keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, so that Google can transfer all signals to the new URLs.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Google's site move guide says that, as a general rule, a small to medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move and larger sites take longer, depending on the number of URLs and server speed.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google treats a site move as a complex canonicalization process in which every signal of the old site is recalculated and moved to the new one, and every indexing process has to run.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
A site move can finish within a few weeks for a small site, takes one to three months on average, and in the worst case about a year.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Gary Illyes said a site move can take up to about a year in the worst case, because Google's slowest signal is recalculated only about once a year (some words of this passage are uncertain readings).
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Google's redirects guide says Google Search follows JavaScript location redirects only after rendering, may never see one if rendering fails, and should be used only when server-side or meta refresh redirects are impossible; its site move guide asks for server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) where technically possible. The JavaScript in Google's own migration was a fallback ('my only option'), not a pattern to copy.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · Q&A
For URLs removed in a consolidation, return 404 or 410: Google's site move guide names those two codes, and Google's crawlers treat every 4xx code except 429 the same way, as content that does not exist, so the choice between them matters less than not redirecting to an unrelated page.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
The 304-day median recovery a community speaker cited from an unnamed study and Google's site move guide (a few weeks or more for a medium-sized site until Google shows the new URLs, longer for larger sites) measure different things: indexing can switch within weeks while traffic recovery can take far longer, so plan and report on both.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
Keep migration redirects in place for at least a year and judge a site move after one to three months, not days: Google's speaker said its slowest signal needs about a year to be recalculated (a partly uncertain passage of the recording), and Google's site move guide says to keep redirects generally at least one year.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Kit items about Site move: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Rests on 14 claims, 6 of them naming Site move; its own words name Site move
Redirect an old URL only to a page with the same intent, and return 404 or 410 when there is none
Rests on 7 claims, 1 of them naming Site move; its own words name Site move
Plan releases and fixes around Google's processing times, and judge results only after them
Rests on 11 claims, 1 of them naming Site move; its own words name Site move
Also inglossary terms Change of Address tool, Alternate names
Google's site move guide says to keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, so that Google can transfer all signals to the new URLs.
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.