GWT - Use the change of address tool

[onlinesource]

If I recently purchased a competitor's website such as www.sample1.com and I'm 301 redirecting his traffic to my site at www.sample2.com, is that good enough?

I've tried to do a CHANGE OF ADDRESS request in Google and the process is frustrating because now I can't edit a lot of things in my sample1.com property listing including "site settings" and "preferred domain" because it says, "Not all options are available because of a Change of Address request related to this site."

Apparently if I withdraw my request to CHANGE THE ADDRESS I can change "site settings" again. How important is this? I thought Google could tell the site moved because of the 301 redirect alone?

[aakk9999]

How are you redirecting this traffic? I mean have you implemented page-to-page redirect (mapped each page of the competitor's site you bought to your site?). Or is it a simple 301 that sends everything from competitor's site to home page of your site?

I am asking this because I would normally execute change of addresss if there is a domain move, so the structure of the domain and the URL path/filename (part of URL after protocol/hostname) remains the same and what is changing is protocol / host name or both.

Where the new site structure is not very similar to the site being redirected then in these cases I would not normally execute "Change of address" but perhaps someone else has experience for these cases.

[onlinesource]

I created a new page on my site called sample2.com/sample1 which talks about how we bought sample2, what makes us better, how we can help them with old orders, etc. I then 301 redirected every page to sample2.com/sample1. I've seen other sites do something similar to this.

[lucy24]

I then 301 redirected every page to sample2.com/sample1.

That's not really a change of address, then. If all requests for oldsite/anything are getting redirected to oldsite/newsite.html, wouldn't it make more sense to serve a global 410 for oldsite (with exception for that one page), and designate oldsite/newsite.html as the 410 page?

Pro tip: In the present discussion, it might be less confusing if you refer to the two domains as "example.old" and "example.new". Or "example.theirs" and "example.mine". (Yes, you can use any TLD, including made-up ones, so long as it's "example".)

[onlinesource]

That's not really a change of address, then. If all requests for oldsite/anything are getting redirected to oldsite/newsite.html, wouldn't it make more sense to serve a global 410 for oldsite (with exception for that one page), and designate oldsite/newsite.html as the 410 page?

Maybe what I wrote was wrong. It's going oldsite.example to newsite.example/a-welcome-page that basically again just says OLDSITE is NEWSITE, thanks for visiting, etc.

I thought this was best way to handle it instead of redirecting all traffic to my homepage without any mention of the OLDSITE domain.

[aakk9999]

Since every page on the site you bought (example.theirs) is now redirecting to a single page on your current domain (example.yours/new-landing-page) then (as Lucy pointed out above) this is not the change of address.

I am not sure why you bought the site but it is worth considering that if itwas for organic traffic, then since example.theirs now redirects, then these pages will drop out of Google index after some time and therefore there will be no orgainc traffic to redirect to your site. This leaves only direct traffic and referrals from other sites to example.theirs that would end up on a new landing page on your current site.

Aren't there at least some high value traffic pages for which you could find an equivalent page on your site and do page-to-page redirect for these, leaving low value page as bulk redirect to your newly created landing page?

If you do identify these high value traffic pages on the site you bought and you do have equivalents page on your site for such pages, then you could display some kind of "welcome, we bought example.theirs, here is how we are better" somewhere on the top of your current site landing page based on referrer so that this message only shows to visitors that were redirected.