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
-
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 -
Change E-commerce Plataform... redirect urls... and images?
we are changing the e-commerce store and usually we do the redirection of all pages URLs... We usually don´t redirect css, js and images files .... Shouldn´t we redirect images as well?
Technical SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Changing your Anchor Text in 2014
Hello I have a series of question, There was a directory listing we submitted to and got approved. However we got 6 Links total with the same Anchor Text 3 from www and 3 from non www, which is also the Title of our Brand Name. However this is causing an unnatural link. 1. Does Changing the Anchor Text Bad? Does Google have a new way of detecting anchor text changes.
Technical SEO | | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT
2. Can I change the Title/Anchor to something more generic, so that the anchor text profile is more natural.
3. Since this is a Directory is http://obln.org/ - Does anybody know being on this directory bad?
Or should I just remove this links altogether or Disavow 5 Links and just keep one, because they have a PR5 and has trust flow, losing all the links may not be good as well for ranking. Thanks For your Insight.0 -
Why are my changes not being updated?
Last week, I was notified of having a lot of duplicated title pages. I've recently made the changes on my website with unique content. I went back on MOZ this morning, and I'm still notified with the same problems. However, when I check the back end of that specific page, I see the changes already made. My question is, why are my changes not being updated in MOZ? Does it take awhile for MOZ to recognize this or am I missing a step?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Change e-commerce platform and domain name SEO issue.
Hi, We are looking to switch from Bigcommerce to either Magento or Shopify, but we have some concern about the redirecting of all URL and not sure where to help. Also, we are looking to remove "hyphen" www.ide-home.com.au in our domain name, again it is all about 301 redirecting. We need SEO expert to help us with all changes that minimize the effect on Google. Does anyone can suggest which company or who we can ask for help? Thanks very much.
Technical SEO | | ide-home020 -
Big on-page changes: all at once or little by little?
Hello, I have a website with bad urls (http://www.domain.com/site/page.php will become http://www.domain.com/page.php) and bad titles (keyword stuffing) and I have to fix all of them. Should I change the urls (and, yes, make the proper 301 redirects) and get crawled by the S.E., before I give a unique title for each page or viceversa? Or maybe shoud I do everything at once? What's the best practice to minimize the ranking drop and how long will it take to resume (and increase) the previous ranking?
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
Hello, we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot. We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance: http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back. The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers: Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Technical SEO | | bimp
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future? I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us. Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages. Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages? Thanks for your help Cord0 -
What Parts Of Domain Registration Change Affect Rank
Could changing one's physical address for a domain or going from public to private registration have a negative affect on rank? Other factors? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 945011