: Google change of address, stuck at step 2 I'm changing the domain name of a WordPress site. I've verified the new domain name (both www and non-www) and setup 301 redirect rules for all URLs.

Posted in: #301Redirect #Domains #GoogleSearchConsole

I'm changing the domain name of a WordPress site. I've verified the new domain name (both www and non-www) and setup 301 redirect rules for all URLs.

On the "Change of address" page in Webmaster tools, I'm unable to go past step 2 Confirm that 301-redirects work properly. The loading animation just goes on and on.

Firebug's console tab shows the following HTTP response when I hit the Check button:

{"jspb":[null,0,2]}

Edit

I found out cause of the never ending step 2, I had blocked Google Analytics URLs (google-analytics.com, ssl.google-analytics.com) and this caused JS errors with Webmaster tools.

Now Step 2 shows the following error:

We couldn't crawl your site. Check that Googlebot can crawl the root of your site using the Fetch as Google tool.

Fetch as Google shows a Temporarily unreachable error for all URLs. Google says:

1) Fetch as Google can’t currently fetch your URL because the server took too long to reply.

OR

2) Fetch as Google cancelled your fetch because too many consecutive requests were made to the server for different URLs.

I don't think #1 is the problem because I went to the extent of using tcpdump to capture network packets when doing a "Fetch as Google" and could not find any requests from Google. There are other sites on this VPS and Google is able to access them without any problems.

The second one could be the reason, but this answer says it is an intermittent problem that goes away after a short period of time. But I've been facing it for 3 days with no solution.

Old domain : jesin.tk (Fetch as Google returns errors for this domain)
New domain : websistent.com