Change of Address in Google Search Console

[seoaustin]

I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the  Moz Guide - https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects .  I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain.  So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist.

I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD.  Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity.

Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links.

Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before?  Thanks for your help/suggestions.

[GlobeRunner]

Brad, since the domain is not going to be yours, and you'll be unable to actually verify it in Google Search Console, then you probably won't be able to use the Google Change of Address Tool.

However, if you are using 301 permanent redirects to redirect the content to your site, that should be good enough. Typically, when you use the Change of Address Tool you get more "credit" from Google, as it looks like they will pass most of the "link juice" over to the new domain--you don't get that when you only 301 redirect from domain to domain, you will lose some "link juice".

I do recommend that you go ahead and use the 301 redirects.