Search Console Change of Address Tool Issue

[RichardUK]

We're currently migrating few "event" mini sites to a main site that will have a subfolder for each event..

Example:
newsite.com/event1

The issue is that Search console is not able to verify this kind of redirect:
example.com --> 301 --> newsite.com/event

Do you know any work around for this?

I was thinking of using a subdomain instead which will in turn redirect to the /event subfolder.. but with each hop it will diminish the link's strength. I prefer not to leave it as subdomain as data gets mashed up in Google Analytics with subdomains and we have seen worse ranking results with subdomains.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Xiano]

You're right that you can't use Search Console for this kind of redirect, unfortunately, you'll just have to do it the old fashioned way, as far as I'm aware, and just set up your redirects and wait for Google to catch up.

I certainly wouldn't set up a redirect to a subdomain and then redirect that. Google will not appreciate being "lied" to and I suspect it will take just as long for Google to update the index. I would simply set up the redirects and wait patiently. In the meantime, the customer experience will be fine as they'll click an outdated link and be redirected to the page they're expecting anyway.

[seoelevated]

If "ALL" of your pages on example.com are migrating to somewhere on newsite.com, the one approach you could take would be to use the change of address at the domain level, and then set up redirects specifically on newsite.com for each of the old file paths. This would not be relevant if example.com is still going to be around. But if it is going away, then this approach would do what you want.