Google Webmaster Tools change domain from third level

Question

I had a blog running on Tumblr on foobar.tumblr.com and at some point I thought I'd just get foobar.com and set that up as a custom domain.

Yet, as far as I can tell, there is no way I can communicate Google a change of domain from third to second level, other than setting up 301 everywhere (e.g. there is no reference here, and the change domain option in Webmaster Tools is disabled).

While the redirects are not an issue (Tumblr does that automatically) it seems strange that such a common operation can't be helped, and at the moment I see both domains in search results, which appears mighty strange.

Is there something else I could do other than wait for the old domain to disappear?

Answer 1

As Tumblr say in their guide to using custom domains, you're right, they'll handle the redirects for you. Unfortunately you won't be able to do much more to communicate this change to Google yourself.

What you can do is make sure to register the new domain with Google Webmaster Tools and verify it using a TXT record in your DNS. Once you've done that and Tumblr has everything set up and redirecting on their end, go into Health > Fetch as Google to submit your top pages to Google for crawling. This will at least make Google aware of the new domain so that it can start referencing it there.