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
-
Businesses That Have 2 Trading Addresses
Hi, I have a quick question regarding Local SEO. We have a building company that operates from 2 addresses, about 70 miles apart. When we changed the address in the footer of our website to a different registered office the rankings for that local area bombed. What I would like to know is if there is a way I can properly mark up the site so that Google recognizes the same business works from 2 locations. Thanks
Technical SEO | | denismilton0 -
Preserving Social Shares Through URL Changes
We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us. In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this. Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC1 -
Changing broken links and Anchor text be a problem?
Hi, Changing broken links and Anchor text be a problem? We have 80K pages which has about 40K links which has been created in the last few years and from last month we have been working on updating content on those pages that's old and links that are broken and changing the anchor text in those posts. Anchor text like Click me, Here,Download, link, etc is changed to meaningful words. its a total close to 10K link replacements and 10K anchor text. While doing this from last month have seen a slight decrease in daily traffic. is this something Google would consider as some kind of a wrong webmaster activity? or its just fine? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Google Places Page Changes
We had a client(dentist) hire another marketing firm(without our knowledge) and due to some Google page changes they made, their website lost a #1 ranking, was disassociated with the places page and was placed at result #10 below all the local results. We quickly made some changes and were able to bring them up to #2 within a few days and restore their Google page after about a week, but the tracking/forwarding phone number the marketing company was using shows up on the page despite attempts to contact Google through updating the business in places management as well as submit the phone number as incorrect while providing the correct phone number. And because the client fired that marketing company, the phone number will no longer be active in a few days. Of course this is very important for a dental office. Has anyone else had problems with the speed and updating Google Places/Plus pages for businesses? What's the most efficient way to make changes like this?
Technical SEO | | tvinson0 -
Closed Address Google Local
While there are some older conversations pertaining to Google Local/Plus, I am not sure if issue is a bit different. The company I work for at one time had two locations. Both are brick & mortar, physical locations. The factory closed several years ago. To my surprise, the old location is coming up in a few Google searches as a Google Plus page (actually just located it toward the end of last week.) It is currently unclaimed. There are a handful of citations out on the web as well. To remove the factory listing (the one we don't want, which I am pretty sure is confusing Google), what is the best approach? Remove/update citations for the old listing? And then claim it and suspend it using our Google Places account? It took a while to claim the listing we actually want and I just want to be sure we handle removing the old one correctly. Any insight or advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
How to tell google about the changes
Hello All this is my first question here. we have recently changed our website design and backend. so the problem now is in google it is showing the old url's and when ever a client come from google he is prasented with a 404 error page if this happenes many times. will google penalise our site ? if yes. how to prevent this from happen. waiting for some replies.. thanks
Technical SEO | | idreams1 -
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 -
Google Places and Name Change
Hello - I have a client who is a realtor and changed agencies. I edited their Google Places entry and the new name of their agency and address are showing - but so is their old listing. The agency they left is now trying to sue them for showing up in a number one position with Google Places under their agency name. Is this an indexing issue with Google? Their name shows up under both agency names. The corrected one shows most often, but the old one is still popping up on occasion. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seoessentials1