Moving a site to a new domain name

Moving to a new domain in Yandex means grouping the old and new addresses and making the new one primary. Yandex states the risk plainly and it should be repeated to any client: changing the primary address does not guarantee that page count, ranking or traffic will be preserved.

Step 1 — both sites in the console

Add and verify rights on the old and the new address. Without both, the tool does not appear.

Step 2 — preconditions the robot checks

• The new address must not be grouped with somebody else’s site; if it is, ungroup first. Ungrouping is not needed when the addresses differ only by protocol or by the www prefix, or when the new URL is already an alternate of the old one.
• Server response under 10 seconds, returning 200 OK for the new URL and 200 or a redirect code for the old one.
• Both domains must allow the Yandex robot in robots.txt, and the two files should have identical content so the robot can check the same URLs on both. A redirect from the old file to the new one also works, provided the directives are valid for both sites.

That robots.txt requirement is the step most migrations skip, and it silently prevents the move from completing.

Step 3 — redirects

301 oder 302 from old pages to their counterparts. Both the home page (required for the move to be recognised) and internal pages (which is how metrics reach the right destinations). Yandex warns against redirecting everything to the new home page: it is poor for users and it slows down indexing of the new site. Where domain and directory names both change, a double redirect is expected. With more than two sites in the group, every one of them must redirect to the intended primary.

Where a redirect is impossible, the refresh meta tag is treated in some cases as a 302.

Step 4 — Relocate site

Under Indexing → Relocate site, enter the new address and save. The change takes several weeks. Enable notifications so you learn when it completes.

If the tool is missing

You can only move a site that is currently the primary address. If yours is grouped as an alternate, the console shows Ungrouping site addresses instead — ungroup, then move.