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I have existing heavy traffic from my Tumblr page and 2 articles in the top search results. Today I purchased a custom domain to use on Tumblr. Before that, my site was already verified in Google Webmaster Tools. So I thought after integrating my custom domain with Tumblr, I will just let Google know about the domain change in Google Webmaster Tools.

Unfortunately there is no option for this on subdomain-level. So now what I did is registered my new custom domain as separate site and verified it. Now there are two site in my Webmaster Tools, my subdomain Tumblr URL (which is now a redirect, not even a page) and my custom URL.

Is there a negative affect for this, or should I just delete my subdomain site from Google Webmaster Tools and remove the verification tag?

There is no problem with redirection since Tumblr handles it really well, even my old pages are properly linked.

It is just weird to see that still I can see my Tumblr subdomain on popular searches, and no results for my new custom domain.

What should I do next? Should I submit a sitemap?

UPDATE:

Crawling average is just 300 while my old domain gets 1500 average, and also I submitted a sitemap but after 48 hours only 72 pages are indexed out of 5000 pages

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2 Answers 2

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If you have redirected the old pages to the new pages then you have done the most important part. Check that the redirect is a 301 redirect which means 'moved permanently' The site move feature in webmaster tools doesn't redirect a website, whereas 301 redirects do.

You will still see pages from your old domain in the search index as it will take some time for Google to crawl the whole of your old website, see the redirections and apply the changes. Just a matter of time for the whole process to complete.

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  • It is a 301 redirect as I checked. Even all my old pages are redirect and are all 301. Which is a relief. Should I now delete my old URL from Webmaster tools because now I have mycustomdomain.com and domain.tumblr.com. The later is only a redirect now. Thank you for giving time to answer. Really appreciated.
    – KristianKenneth
    Commented Feb 4, 2014 at 21:59
  • It makes no difference to the process whether you delete the tumblr site from webmaster tools or not.
    – user29671
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 7:33
  • Thank you. I kept them both for now. There is no error however crawling average is just 300 while my old domain gets 1500 average, and also I submitted a sitemap but after 48 hours only 72 pages are indexed out of 5000 pages.
    – KristianKenneth
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 19:12
  • Can take months & months for the site to fully transfer over, probably you'll see your main pages processed first as they would be crawled more than the others.
    – user29671
    Commented Feb 7, 2014 at 9:14
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Edited post since the previous paragraphs apparently wasn't as true as I thought they were.

If you'd like to try some other approach then I suggest reading this:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3546-SEO-Site-Migration-Checklist

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  • Thank you for this. I will definitely inform them as well. The problem I am encountering now is mainly because my old url is a subdomain. I can't use all other tips and resources because they are mostly for root domains only.
    – KristianKenneth
    Commented Feb 4, 2014 at 22:05
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    You certainly don't want to remove the HTTP redirect and implement a notice that the site has moved instead! If you did that then Google will never pick up that the site has moved and will simply start seeing duplicate content.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 3:03
  • Seems reasonable. The paragraphs up to the bold statement was my personal opinion and something that I was just guessing, anyways.
    – Linus Juhlin
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 7:10
  • @P1raten Maybe you can present or bullet-point some of the suggestions in that blog in case it moves or goes down (you might also remove "Edited post..." as well since users can see edits and it's no longer part of your answer).
    – dan ♦
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 17:12

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