Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Your answer is confusing sorry. If you're not supposed to add the old site's verification to your new site, how does anyone complete the Name Change Tool? Step 2 of the tool requires 301 redirects be in place before you can move on Step 3 of the tool requires you verify the old site Obviously, if step 2 is working, then step 3 will always fail. How do you complete the name change tool?

Hey there Ben! Sam from Moz's Help Team here! We'd love to help you to further investigate this - would you be able to pop a message over to help@moz.com, along with the name of the affected campaign and a few examples of the problems that you're seeing? This way we can take a look directly at your site and the CSV results and help you to isolate what's happening here:) Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks for the great answer - I understand now. Cheers Ben

Presumably  humans will still be able to find your search results pages as needed by using the search function on your site. This way, they won't enter your site on a page that might be confusing for them - in my view, it's a win-win! Best of luck!

Must've been a Webmaster tools issue - tried the whole process again and this time Webmatser Tools verifies the site with the 301 redirects in place

Thanks Kate - sorry for the late response. It looks as if Google doesn't account for the local, feel-good factor when people in certain countries see their TLD. e.g. New Zealanders feel better if they see .co.nz because the company seems more local and similarly with Australia - but the content could be identical. And then when you have countries with a healthy rivalry like New Zealand and Australia (or US and Canada) Australians might react differently to seeing NZ's TLD (albeit subtly). I'm not sure I fully understand the downsides to multiple TLDs and duplicate content as which is the original and which is the duplicate depends greatly on which country you're in - it's perception-based. I realise Google doesn't see things this way but is that what Nlevi was talking about with Webmaster Tools - you can tell Google to always serve .com.au to Australians? Anyway, I'm not sure I'm fully understanding the situation as we haven't worked on a site that targets multiple countries specifically before. It seems like it's safer to go with .com because that's what's best for Google even if that's wrong for the customers - especially New Zealanders who feel a loyal sense of ownership with the brand if that makes sense.