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There are five(5) possible messages that you could receive while trying to link your game account. Please find the reason described when trying to link your game account to know what to do in order to be able to link your game and play.

1.)The error message: “It looks like the profile you’re connecting doesn’t meet our requirements.“

This means that the game account you are attempting to link is to new and you need to spend some time playing more on the game account. You could always just not use a new account and connect an account you have owned for awhile.

Brand new game accounts are not permitted on our platform to prevent smurfing from occurring easily with in the games we host. Please keep in mind that our terms and conditions only allow you to have one account on our platform and any new accounts will be deemed as multiple accounts and banned according to our Terms and Conditions.

2.)The error message: “It looks like the account you’re trying to connect is already connected to another FACEIT user.“

This means that the game ID you are attempting to link to your FACEIT account has already been linked in the past on to another FACEIT account.

When you contact us please include the following information:

(You can get the details about your Steam account via www.steamrep.com just sign in to the Valve secure login and then click on your Steam Avatar image and it will show your information we require.)

3.)The error message: “It seems that you are connecting to a game that you have already registered”

This means your account has already been registered to the FACEIT platform and you will have to contact support below. Please note that if you are not the original owner of the account and cannot prove this via Identification then you will not be able to access the account.

4.)The error message: “An error has occurred trying to register the game. Please contact support. “

This means there is a possibility of issues with your game accounts API and our API:

When you contact us please include the following information:

(You can get the details about your Steam account via www.steamrep.com just sign in to the Valve secure login and then click on your Steam Avatar image and it will show your information we require.)

5.)The error message: “ It looks like the profile you’re connecting doesn’t have the game or your game privacy settings are not public “

This means that your Steam Account’s Game Privacy Settings are set to “Friends Only” or “Private”. To be able to add a game to your FACEIT account, you must have this set to “Public”.

Steps to changing Game Privacy Settings

If you still require help click below to contact us directly by email

Существует множество игровых платформ, где геймеры могут посоревноваться с реальными соперниками из любой точки мира. FaceIt – одна из них. Здесь юзеры регистрируются и потом открывается доступ к таким популярным играм, как CS:GO, Dota 2, Лига Легенд (League of Legends).

Но нередко при попытке входа в аккаунт возникает ошибка – Game account is already linked to another user FaceIt — что делать в такой ситуации, сейчас расскажу.

Отказ в регистрации

Если увидите подобное уведомление – нет повода для паники. Для тех, кто не силён в иностранных языках, перевод на русский следующий – «Игровой аккаунт уже привязан к другому пользователю». Вот, что значит ошибка «Game account is already linked to another user».

Скорее всего, указанный в процессе авторизации адрес электронной почты уже используется другими игроками, или же вы ранее регистрировались с его использованием. Теперь необходимо указать подходящий пароль от учетной записи.

Людям свойственно забывать коды и логины, а если прошло немало времени, то здесь нет ничего удивительного. Но может быть такое, что Вы приобрели аккаунт Фейсит, который был взломан и выставлен на продажу в интернете.

Если просто забили, то можно восстановить пароль или же создать новую «учетку», указав иной e-mail. Давайте подробнее разберем указанные варианты.

Как восстановить доступ FaceIt

В первую очередь, постарайтесь вспомнить код, к какому аккаунту он был привязан. Пересмотрите входящие письма в почтовом ящике, возможно там найдете эмайл с информацией для авторизации. Если ничего не обнаружили, стоит перейти к восстановлению.

Обратите внимание, что форма входа состоит из нескольких полей ввода, под которыми есть ссылка «Забыли пароль?». Вот по ней и нужно кликнуть:

Далее необходимо указать e-mail, указываемый ранее при регистрации в Фейсит. На него будет отправлена ссылка для замены действующего кода доступа на новый. Если не помните, какой мейл использовали, то поочередно укажите каждый, принадлежащий Вам. А потом просто проверьте папку «Входящие» по всем адресам электронной почты. Кроме того, система выдаст ошибку, если Вы ввели незарегистрированный e-mail. То есть, круг поиска существенно сузится.

Автор рекомендует:

Как создать новый аккаунт?

Если уведомление “Game account is already linked to another user» застало Вас врасплох, а инструкция по восстановлению не актуальная в Вашем случае, то единственным вариантом станет создание новой учетной записи FaceIt.

Но что делать, если хотелось бы использовать прежний адрес. Тогда стоит обратиться с службу клиентской поддержки сервиса с просьбой удалить аккаунт (не переживайте, данные сохранятся). При этом следует в обращении указать максимум достоверной информации об игроке:

Разобрались с проблемой – «game account is already linked to another user Faceit» как исправить, что делать. Вариантов не так уж много. И зависит всё в значительной мере от самого пользователя. Надеяться на администрацию особо не стоит. Пока они доберутся до Вашей просьбы, обработают её, а потом не факт, что одобрят все требования. Поэтому, старайтесь не забывать данный для входа!

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How do I move a domain from one account to another?

I have a few domains on my account that I wish to move to another account. I am not talking about moving from one project to another (which seems easy enough), but rather completely letting go of a domain (dns) and move all the records to a new account.

I guess I could simply delete the domain on the old account, and then create it on the new. But since I can’t prepare the records on the new account, as it’s not possible to create the same domain on two accounts, there’s going to be some downtime?

Also for domains with lots of records, it’s going to be a hassle to create them by hand on the new account. I do see an option to download a zone, but not to import a zone. So what’s the point?

I am hoping for a solution.

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Domains FAQ

This article contains answers to frequently asked questions about domains in Microsoft 365.

If you can’t find an answer to your question, let us know by leaving a comment and we’ll add it to the list.

What is MX priority?

Mail is delivered to the mail exchange server with the lowest preference number (highest priority), so the MX record you use for mail routing should have the lowest preference number, typically 0 or High priority.

When you create an MX record, most DNS hosting providers require you to set the preference number.

Some label the box preference, and some label it priority.

Some require a number, and some ask you to select Low, Medium, or High.

If you only have one MX record, any value is fine for priority or preference.

If you have more than one, make sure the MX record for mail routing is higher priority than the one used for validating that you own the domain.

How can I validate SPF records for my domain?

It’s important that you have or create only one TXT record for SPF. If you already have an SPF record, you should append the new Microsoft 365 values to it, rather than create a new one. After you’ve added or updated your SPF record for Microsoft email, you should check to make sure that the syntax is correct with one of these tools:

What is a domain name?

A domain is a unique name that appears after the @ sign in email addresses, and after www. in web addresses. It typically takes the form of your organization’s name and a standard Internet suffix, such as yourbusiness.com or stateuniversity.edu.

Using a custom domain like «rob@contoso.com» with Microsoft 365 can help build credibility and recognition for your brand.

You can buy a domain in Microsoft 365 and we’ll set it up automatically, or you can buy or bring one you already own from a domain registrar.

Is it possible to connect a domain with Personal or Family offerings?

As a benefit of your Microsoft 365 Family or Microsoft 365 Personal subscription, you can create a personalized email address that’s associated with your Outlook.com mailbox, for example, yourname@example.com. At the moment, we only support connecting domains managed by GoDaddy with Outlook.com. For more information, see Get a personalized email address in Microsoft 365.

What happens if my DNS provider doesn’t support certain record types?

If you manage your own DNS records and your DNS host does not support all the DNS records that Microsoft 365 needs, some Microsoft 365 features won’t work. We recommend that you transfer your domain to a registrar that supports all required DNS records.

Providers that support all required DNS records:

Nearly Free Speech

Network Information Center (NIC)

How do I set or change the default domain in Microsoft 365?

You must have at least one custom domain that you’ve added to Microsoft 365 before you can choose a default domain.

On the Domains page, select the domain you want to set as the default for new email addresses.

Select Set as default.

You cannot change the name of your initial .onmicrosoft.com domain.

You cannot change the name of your initial .partner.onmschina.cn domain.

Changing the default domain does not impact user credentials or their access to applications or services. Changing the domain that a user is associated with will impact mail, online storage, and login credentials.

Can I add custom subdomains or multiple domains to Microsoft 365?

Yes. To add subdomains, you must manage your own DNS settings at your registrar’s website. If you are letting Microsoft manage your DNS settings with NS records, or if you bought the domain from Microsoft, you can’t add subdomains.

Yes! To add subdomains, you must manage your own DNS settings at your registrar’s website. If you are letting 21Vianet manage your DNS settings with NS records, you can’t add subdomains.

Typically, you can add up to 900 domains to your Microsoft 365 subscription.

When you add a subdomain, it is automatically verified based on the parent domain that is being verified.

When you add multiple domains to Microsoft 365, you can host any of the services (like email) on any of the domains you’ve added. When you change your email to Microsoft 365, by updating a domain’s MX record, ALL email sent to that domain will start coming to Microsoft 365.

If you added a contoso.com domain to a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can also add the subdomain xyz.contoso.com to another Microsoft 365 organization. When adding the subdomain, you are prompted to add a TXT record in the DNS hosting provider.

How do I transfer a domain from Microsoft 365 to another host?

Pilot Microsoft 365 from my custom domain

For the procedure to pilot Microsoft 365 email functionality from a custom domain to a Microsoft 365 mailbox, see Pilot Microsoft 365 from my custom domain.

Why do I have an «onmicrosoft.com» domain?

Microsoft 365 creates a domain for you, like contoso.onmicrosoft.com, when you sign up with the service. The user ID that you create when you sign up includes the domain, like alan@contoso.onmicrosoft.com.

If you want to have your email look like alan@contoso.com: buy the domain or just follow the steps in Add your users and domain to Microsoft 365 if you own it already.

You can replace your onmicrosoft domain after sign-up. While you can’t rename or remove an existing onmicrosoft.com domain, you can create a new one and make it your default onmicrosoft.com domain (your “fallback domain”). For example, if the initial domain you chose was fourthcoffee.onmicrosoft.com, if needed you can create a new onmicrosoft.com domain called fourthcoffeecorp.onmicrsoft.com and set it to be your fallback domain.

You might not be able to change your SharePoint domain name. Your SharePoint domain name is based on your onmicrosoft.com domain name. The ability to change the SharePoint domain name is available in public preview for organizations whose total SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts number fewer than 1000.

You can’t remove your onmicrosoft domain. Microsoft 365 needs to keep it around because it’s used behind the scenes for your subscription. But you don’t have to use the domain yourself after you’ve added a custom domain. If you choose to create a new onmicrosoft.com domain, it cannot be removed. You are limited to five onmicrosoft.com domains in your Microsoft 365 environment, so make sure to check for spelling and to assess your need if you choose to create a new one.

You can keep using the initial onmicrosoft.com domain even after you add your domain. It still works for email and other services, so it’s your choice.

How do I verify my nonprofit or education status?

Select Setup in the admin center to start the wizard. (Be sure to sign in to Microsoft 365 first.)

To become the admin for your school, select the Become an admin option in Microsoft 365.

You’ll be prompted to add a TXT DNS record at the DNS host website for your domain. Why? Because by signing in at the DNS host and adding a record for your domain, you prove to Microsoft 365 that you own the domain name.

After you add the record, you’ll go back to the Microsoft 365 portal and confirm that you’ve added it, so Microsoft 365 can check.

Have a nonprofit and want to get Microsoft 365? Make sure your organization qualifies and then sign up for the service.

Want to know more about becoming the admin for your school? Learn all about it.

How can I create a website for my business?

Watch a short video: Create your business website about using a web hosting provider to create a website for your domain.

Microsoft 365 does not include a public website for your business. To set one up, consider using a web hosting company like GoDaddy, Wix, or WordPress.

Search for a web hosting provider where you can build your website.

You may find it easiest to choose the website builder at the same company where your domain name is registered.

Design your business website, making sure to include your business logo, business purpose, text, images, and links.

To integrate the website with Microsoft 365, you can add your business email to the website and a link to Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or other collaboration tool.

Make sure to connect your website to your domain name, which you’re also using for email on Microsoft 365.

How to Login with a Local Windows Account Instead of Domain Account?

Let’s take a look at a little trick to login to Windows with a local user account instead of a domain account. By default, when the user enters a username on the Welcome Screen of a domain-joined computer, and there is also a local account with the same name, the domain account will take precedence. We keep coming across people that don’t know this little trick, so we thought it would be worthwhile sharing.

Logging Into Local Accounts on Windows

After the computer is joined to the Active Directory domain, you can sign in under the domain or local user account. On the login screen in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, there is a drop-down list “Log on to“. Here you can choose whether you want to log in under the domain account or use a local user (select “this computer”).

However, in newer versions of Windows, this drop-down menu no longer exists. Instead of this, a user is faced with a small button How to log on to another domain which appears near on the domain-joined computers Welcome Screen. If you click this button, the following tip will appear:

Type domain namedomain user name to sign in to another domain.
Type NY-FS01\local user name to sign in to this PC only (not a domain)

As you can see, the message contains the name of your computer/server (NY-FS01 in our case). If you want to login with a local account (for example, Administrator), type in NY-FS01\Administrator in the User name field and type the password. Of course, if your computer name is quite long, the input can be a real challenge!

Fortunately, there is a simple trick that allows you to log in under a local account.

Login Windows with Local Account without Typing Computer Name

Windows uses the dot as the alias symbol for the local computer:

You can also type the computer name followed by a backslash and the username, and it will do the same thing.

This way you can logon to a local account on a domain-joined computer on all Windows versions. This applies versions from Windows Vista to Windows 10/Windows Server 2016.

Tip. You can use the same trick when you need to use the local user credential to access the shared folder over the network (using SMB protocol).

Types of User Accounts in Windows 10

In Windows 10, you can use three types of accounts to sign in to the device:

Hint. Can you sign in with a Microsoft account without an Internet connection? Of course! You only need to be connected to the Internet when you create a Microsoft account or switch to a local account. After the first login, the credentials of that account are cached locally, and subsequent logins don’t require an Internet connection.

The default local Windows account name is Administrator. In modern versions of Windows, this account is disabled by default. Instead, when you first log in to Windows, you are prompted to create a new account. This account is automatically added to the built-in Administrators group.

Unfortunately, Windows Login Screen UI doesn’t enumerate local users on domain-joined computers by default, so you’ll have to enter the username manually. If the name of the built-in administrator on the computer is changed from Administrator to something else (for example, using Local Administrator Password Solution), you can only find out the names of all local users by logging in with your domain account.

If you do not know the names of local accounts on your computer, or you cannot log in under the built-in administrator (this account name can be renamed manually or via domain Group Policies), you can display a list of all local Windows accounts from the command line:

How to Login to Windows 10 under the Local Account Instead of Microsoft Account?

In the latest Windows 10 builds, Microsoft recommends using Microsoft accounts instead of local Windows accounts. On Windows 10 1909 you can’t even create a local account when installing Windows if you have an Internet connection available. If you do not want to use the Microsoft account on Windows 10, you can switch to a traditional local Windows account.

Once you complete these steps, your Windows 10 account will be disconnected from your Microsoft account. It will switch to the traditional local account style.

Show All Local Accounts on Welcome Screen in Windows 10

On Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019, you can list all enabled local user accounts on the Logon Screen. To show all local users on Windows 10 Welcome Screen:

As a result, you do not need to type the user name manually, but simply select it from the local account list.

How to Allow or Prevent User from Signing In Locally on Windows 10?

By default, users in the local groups Users, Guests, Backup Operators, and Administrators can sign in locally to Windows 10. However, an administrator can use local or domain Group Policy to restrict logins to Windows locally.

If, when logging in with a local account, you are getting the error “The sign in method you’re trying to use isn’t allowed. For more info, contact your network administrator”, this means that this user or group is not allowed to log on locally.

If you have administrator rights on your computer, you can allow specific users or groups to log on to Windows locally.

By default, in Windows 10 and 11, users are allowed to log on locally if they are members of the following local groups.

On Windows Server hosts, a local user account is not allowed to logon locally. You can logon to Windows Server locally only if your account is a member of the following local security groups:

Hint. Please note that you won’t be able to log in with your local Windows account to a domain controller. After promoting the member-server to DC, the local SAM database becomes unavailable. The only local account on the Active Directory domain controller is the DSRM Administrator.

How to Login Windows via Remote Desktop (RDP) with a Local Account?

The above trick for logging into a domain-joined Windows device under a local account using the .\Administrator account format does not work if you logging into a remote computer over RDP.

When you specify .\administrator in the Remote Desktop Connection client window (mstsc.exe), your RDP client resolves that to \Administrator, and not to \Administrator.

Accordingly, you will not be able to RDP into a remote computer if the passwords of the local and remote users are different.

To connect to a remote domain computer via RDP with a local Windows account, you can use one of the following formats for specifying the username:

In all of these cases, the RDP client will understand that it needs to use the local Windows user on the remote computer to authenticate.

In order for a local user to be able to connect to a domain computer via RDP, he must be a member of the Remote Desktop Users group, or added to the local policy Allow Log on through Remote Desktop Services in the following section of the GPO editor (Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights).

Otherwise, you will see an error:

To sign in remotely, you need the right to sign in through Remote Desktop Services. By default, members of the Administrators group have this right, or if the right has been removed from the Administrators group, you need to be granted this right manually.

By default, RDP login is allowed only for members of the local Administrators group.

How to change domain names & keep rankings in Google

Disclosure: “This article is a personal opinion of research based on my experience of almost 20 years. There is no third party advertising on this page or monetised links of any sort. External links to third party sites are moderated by me. Disclaimer.” Shaun Anderson, Hobo

You can keep the rankings your old site has earned and transfer them to your new site when you migrate from one domain to another. Sometimes this can be complicated, sometimes not.

If you are looking for my migration service, see my website migration services that keep Google rankings.

This is what I would do if I was migrating a website in 2021/2022:

Key Points:

Sign up for our Free SEO training course to find out more.

I’ve audited thousands of websites over 20 years as a professional SEO. Here is what you need to know about SEO in 2022 and a free tool to help you manage your projects or learn about SEO: https://t.co/WwZgEa8yBd A thread (1/10) pic.twitter.com/Abh5m3TOi4

Changing your website’s domain name

QUOTE: “How do I move from one domain to another domain and try to preserve the rankings as best as possible?…do a 301 permanent redirect to the new location (assuming that you’re you’re moving for all time and eternity so this is the good case for a permanent or 301 redirect if you were planning to undo this later or it’s temporary then you’d use a 302 redirect)…. search engines should be able to follow the trail of all the 301 redirects” Matt Cutts, Google, 2011

PS – I’ve quoted Google’s John Mueller a lot in this article:

Why should I care about redirects when I move domain?

QUOTE: “if you really want to move your website then you should try to [use] 301 redirects” John Mueller, Google

301 Redirects are an incredibly important and often overlooked area of search engine optimisation. Properly implemented 301 Redirects are THE cornerstone SEO consideration in any website migration project. You can use 301 redirects to redirect pages, sub-folders or even entire websites and preserve Google rankings that the old page, sub-folder or website(s) enjoyed. Rather than tell Google via a 404, 410 or some other instruction that a page isn’t here anymore, you can permanently redirect an expired page to a relatively similar page to preserve any link equity that old page might have.

Redirecting multiple old pages to one new page works too if the information is there on the new page that ranked the old page. Pages should be thematically connected if you want the redirects to have a SEO benefit.

My general rule of thumb is to make sure the information (and keywords) on the old page are featured prominently in the text of the new page – stay on the safe side.

QUOTE: “If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page.” Google, 2018

If you fail to implement proper redirects when migrating a website from one domain to another you will instantly lose any traffic to your website you currently enjoy, with new visitors often greeted by the dreaded 404 page and soft-404s applied by Google if they do not trust the redirect in a way that helps visitors.

If that’s not reason enough, failing to employ redirects will unquestionably impact on any good rankings your site also enjoys.

Sign up for our Free SEO training course to find out more.

How do I redirect visitors and search engines to my new site?

QUOTE: “301s happen at a page level so just because you see one 301 on one page of the old domain does not mean the entire domain has completely migrated.” Matt Cutts, Google

You redirect any visitor, including search engines, to ANY PAGE on the domain using the same technique: ‘301 permanent redirects’.

Can you transfer rankings from an old domain to another?

QUOTE: “How do I move from one domain to another domain and try to preserve the rankings as best as possible?…do a 301 permanent redirect to the new location.” Matt Cutts, Google, 2011

Yes. If you are planning a rebrand, for example, and need to change website addresses, ensure you 301 redirect all visitors to the new domain (and also redirect any relevant internal pages to internal pages on the new domain).

It is also important to convey your old domain’s search engine rankings to the new web address – or your website will effectively be starting from zero visibility, in search engines at any rate.

How long do I keep 301 redirects in place?

I do not think the video above actually answers this question in a very meaningful way.

The real answer is….Forever. Until you die, or the website does. Whatever comes first. As soon as you remove 301s you break a connection that Google counts on to determine your domain reputation and individual page quality scores.

This is incredibly important of course if you HAVE some domain reputation or site quality scores of note.

Note: A 301 permanent redirect is ONLY permanent as long as the 301 redirect command is in place on the source server. Remove the redirect command, and Google will index pages as it did before you implemented the redirects.

John Mueller also gave us advice in this area:

QUOTE: “So from our point of view, when we look at 301 redirects and permanent site move situations, we do expect that 301 redirect to be there for the long run. So that could be something maybe a year, or ideally even longer than a year, so that we can really be sure that everything that was pointing at the old URLs is pointing at the new URLs. And also if users are going to those pages directly, through bookmarks that they might have saved, through old links that are out there on the web, then they might still be kind of clicking on those old links and they expect to land on the final page.” John Mueller, Google, 2016

QUOTE: “Ideally, you would have that redirect there for a long run, but I know from a practical point of view at some point you have to say oh, it’s finished, we can’t pay the domain name anymore, the other guy wants to do something else with the domain name, so at some point you are going to cut that off, but I’d really aim for something at least like a year. And if you have access, you can look at the server logs and see how many people are actually being redirected there. And if you notice after a year there’s still a lot of normal people being redirected, maybe you can figure out how they are reaching the old domain, is it like an important link you forgot to get updated on the web, is it just lots of people with bookmarks and you can’t really fix their own bookmarks, that’s kind of what I would aim for there, at least a year.” John Mueller, Google 2016

Will redirects dilute PageRank?

QUOTE: “30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore.” Gary IIlyes, Google 2016

QUOTE: “Do I lose “link juice” from the redirects? No, for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS no PageRank is lost.” John Mueller, Google 2016

How long does it take for Google to implement a full site migration?

It can take quite some time for Google to totally ‘forget’ about your old domain. You may see old URLs somewhat frustratingly still appear in the SERPs.

QUOTE: “Anytime you do a bigger change on your website if you redirect a lot of URLs or if you go from one domain to another or if you change your site’s structure then all of that does take time for things to settle down so we can follow that pretty quickly we can definitely forward the signals there but that doesn’t mean that’ll happen from one day to next” John Mueller, Google 2016

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Is there a limit to the amount of 301 redirects Google will follow in a ‘chain‘?

YES. Over my nearly 20 years of experience in this field, I’ve often heard the limit to be about 5 or 6 although Matt Cutts said it was risky even up at the 4, 5 and 6 hops in the chain.

Google confirmed (2017) that it will follow up to 5 redirects. See the official confirmation in the video below (from John Mueller).

QUOTE: “We follow up to five redirect steps in a redirect chain if it’s a server-side redirect.” John Mueller, Google

I would NOT rely on that MANY redirect in a chain, though, so try to ensure you have as FEW redirects in any chain of redirects at all times to avoid Google changing how it works in this area – e.g. how many redirects Google will honour in the future.

And it does change, often enough in plenty of areas to cause you future challenges.

Does Google treat 302’s the same as 301’s?

QUOTE: “I think there’s a big misconception with 302 redirects being bad for your website and your PageRank and that’s definitely not the case. When we see a 302, we’ll assume it’s a temporary redirect at first. However, if we feel it’s more of a permanent redirect, then we do treat it as a 301. Both of these redirects do pass PageRank.” John Mueller, Google, 2015

Essentially YES. A 302 Temporary Redirect is not ideal, but Google has said it treats 302 redirects left in place essentially like 301’s. John Meuler said in a Hangout that Google also treats 302s in a chain like 301s (although again that is far from ideal).

Still – it is better to be as exact as possible with Google to ensure you get the results you need. When permanently redirecting – use a 301 redirect.

Should I use a 301 or a 302 redirect?

For me I stick with a 301 redirect 99.9% of the time and only use a 302 when someone explains to me exactly why it needs to be a 302 in this instance – that keeps me right:

In short, for 301 redirects or 302 redirects e.g. this image and advice from John Meuller:

HOW TO PROCEED

Audit, monitor and minimise your redirect chains and any URLs you have pointing at content that is not VERY EQUIVALENT to maximise link equity.

Should I tell Google about my change of domain?

YES. I’ve always found it pretty painless although I can appreciate it’s easy to screw up if you don’t know what you’re doing. Now you can actually tell Google about your domain name change in Google Webmaster Tools.

QUOTE: “If you’ve moved your site to a new domain, you can use the Change of address tool to tell Google about your new URL. We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL. Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL. The change of address tool is safe, because only verified site owners can use it. You can check the tool at any time to see the information provided to Google about your domains.” Google, 2010

This new tool from Google will be handy for some, though, you’ll still need to know your way about some technical aspects to use it. See moving your website to another domain. UPDATE – Also see Google announcing support of the cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element.

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Redirect Non-WWW to WWW (or vice versa)

QUOTE: “The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.” Google, 2018

Your site probably has canonicalisation issues (especially if you have an e-commerce website) and it might start at the domain level and this can exacerbate duplicate content problems on your website.

Simply put, https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/ can be treated by Google as a different URL than http://hobo-web.co.uk/ even though it’s the same page, and it can get even more complicated.

Its thought REAL Pagerank can be diluted if Google gets confused about your URLs and speaking simply you don’t want this PR diluted (in theory).

That’s why many, including myself, redirect non-www to www (or vice versa) if the site is on a Linux/Apache server (in the htaccess file –

This is a MUST HAVE best practice. Basically, you are redirecting all ranking signals to one canonical version of a URL. It keeps it simple when optimising for Google. Do not mix the two types of www/non-www on site when linking your internal pages.

Note Google asks you which domain you prefer to set as your canonical domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

QUOTE: “Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.” Google

Some redirects may be treated as soft 404 error pages

Can it be surmised that Google might label certain 301 redirects (that DO NOT redirect to VERY EQUIVALENT CONTENT) as SOFT 404 and so devalue all signals associated with them?

Will this be the same for e-commerce sites?

What Are Soft 404 Pages?

QUOTE: “A soft 404 means that a URL on your site returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code to the browser. (In some cases, instead of a “not found” page, it might be a page with little or no usable content–for example, a sparsely populated or empty page.)” Google, 2018

From my experience, not all soft 404 are created with enough volume to be a problem on most sites, but some auto-generated pages on some sites can produce soft 404 at a content level that with enough number that can cause indexation challenges.

QUOTE: “Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query” GOOGLE, 2020

However, Google will also treat certain mismatched or incorrect redirects as soft-404 type pages, too.

And this is a REAL problem and a marked change from the way Google worked say ten years ago.

It essentially means that Google is not going to honour your redirect instruction and that means you are at risk of knobbling any positive signals you are attempting to transfer through a redirect.

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301 redirecting expired pages to your home page may result in ‘soft-404s’

QUOTE: “So the 301 redirect from all pages to the home page, that would be something that we see as a soft 404s” John Mueller, Google

NO – not for SEO benefit anyways. Google classes many improperly redirected links as soft 404s e.g. if you redirect a lot of URLs to your home page, for instance, is an example Google has given us. When redirecting visitors (and treat Googlebot as a visitor), ALWAYS redirect them to equivalent pages or you risk losing positive ranking signals the old URL has.

For Googlebot – think about the keywords, topics and concepts of the pages you are redirecting to. If they are a good match – Googlebot usually has no problem with that, in my 20 years experience – and will honour your request to redirect rankings.

I always try to find a relevant page to redirect one from another – it’s a good user experience, and that’s a good thing to focus on if you are trying to rank high in Google this year.

NEVER redirect to your home page – always redirect to an internal page, if you choose to redirect at all.

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301 redirects from products to categories may result in soft-404s

A common challenge for lots of e-commerce and classified sites.

Q: Should you 301 redirect old, irrelevant product pages that are no longer relevant to your site, to an existing category or sub-category page on your site?

A: Maybe not, according to John Mueller of Google in a recent video – at least when it comes to classified listings (although advice is offered on e-commerce sites, too)

“Working on a very large classified website listings with millions of listings that expire every month. What are the best practices for indexation?”

John’s response to using EXPIRATION dates for content (that might even still, produce soft 404s at the content level) is not what I am interested in; it is advice on managing expired pages:

301 redirecting to a category, for example, is something we would probably pick up as a soft 404

Q: What about listings, or pages, with “lots of backlinks” from other sites?

If you have an equivalent page that replaces the old one, then redirect to that, apparently.

404 pages are the best practice when you have no exact equivalent content on the site, even when you have backlinks to the URLs in question!

Redirect to “equivalent content“

The message is out of date content can be a ‘bad user experience’ (it will depend on the query, of course) and ONLY REDIRECT content to EQUIVALENT CONTENT – ESPECIALLY if you have backlinks pointing to these pages and you want them to count.

OPINION: Should You Adhere to this Advice From Google?

I think you should lean towards what Google says, where possible.

Experienced SEOs redirect pages, of course, to conserve traffic, ‘link equity’ and ‘domain trust’ or ‘domain authority’ (which is useful metaphorically speaking, but is a metric we are told Google doesn’t have, although they DO understand something about the quality, trust, expertise and online business authority they can expect from a domain).

QUOTE: “So domain authority is kind of a theme picked up by SEO companies or SEO tools. So it’s not really something that we have here at Google.” John Mueller, Google 2017

Maybe this ‘something’ is kind of a quality score (maybe just a big logarithmic number) they have for your domain (after Google algorithms and spam fighters have looked for anything that they should demote you for*). Perhaps your score ‘votes’ for where your content ranks in Google and is then exposed to proxies for user satisfaction like pogo-sticking and the long click that impact this quality score to determine rankings for set periods. Entity optimisation and query re-writing obfuscate all this now, of course. Pure conjecture, of course, that I find myself wondering about.

Sometimes when Google hints at even a slight change in direction as it can end up having a bigger impact much further down the line.

You certainly don’t want to take a chance losing link value, whatever it is, and the best course of action is to listen to Google when they say they are cutting the grass, and minimise your exposure IF they are going to basically just IGNORE some of your redirected links that don’t match what Google wants.

So, does that mean links that don’t redirect to very equivalent content won’t count as much in future? I proceed with that understanding and expectation.

Would it be reasonable to assume you could make a page more relevant to redirected incoming links, by simply adding more keyword specific content that is relevant to the actual links (and the context of the page linking to it)?

Maybe I am reading into that too much, for it would only be useful to know if you had a very old relatively popular site which went through multiple URL structures over many years).

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How to use 301 redirects properly to preserve rankings in Google

I’ve stuck with the same method over the years when it comes to redirects.

If a PARTICULAR CANONICAL HEAD KEYWORD is IMPORTANT (even perhaps a SYNONYM or LONG TAIL VARIANT) and I think a particular 301 REDIRECT has some positive impact on how Google judges the quality or relevance the page, I will make sure the CANONICAL HEAD KEYWORD and SYNONYMS are on the FINAL PAGE I redirect Google to (which is the one that will be rated and cached).

RELEVANT REDIRECTS TO RELEVANT CONTENT.

If I want to boost that pages relevance for that KEYWORD at the center of any redirects, I will ensure the new page content is updated and expanded upon if it is of genuine interest to a user.

Also, note, Google has recently said certain redirects to your home page will also count as soft 404. Don’t expect Toolbar Pagerank to pass via https redirects, for instance, as Toolbar Pagerank is dead.

A temporary or permanent redirect is only ‘in place’ as long as the instruction to do so REMAINS in place in, for instance, your htaccess file. Remove your redirect code, and a permanent redirect just became a temporary redirect and you can lose the benefit of the redirect,

A 302 redirect left in place usually functions as a 301, although I still would not rely on a 302 to function as a 301, based on previous experience (so I make all my redirects 301).

In my experience, a 301 redirect is what most want to use, if a redirect is necessary

Perhaps Google is giving those who will chase it another element to optimise to keep the traffic you already get, and succeed above others who will not take the measures, in this case, to optimise their redirects.

This may end up being another example where to optimise you need to dig down to a level where you need to learn how to be a htaccess / apache optimiser (which I am not, just as I am not a professional copywriter or CSS or mobile wizard).

Fortunately, you can still get away with keeping (whatever it is) as simple, fast and as canonical as possible and that is what I try and do.

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Rel=Canonical can be treated as 301 redirects (kind of)

QUOTE: “We canonical page a) to page b) then after one months we do no index on page a, does page B drop in ranking because the related signals from a are not transferred anymore?”, John Mueller, Google, 2018

John explains two scenarios:

QUOTE: “in general when you have a canonical from one page to the other one and we notice its a confirmed thing and the same content is up on both of these pages and you you have the internal links also pointing to your new canonical then usually we kind of treat that as a redirect…… if you’ve moved all of those signals to the redirect target already then if the original page drops out then it’s gone it doesn’t really have any role anymore because there’s nothing attached to that original URL anymore.” John Mueller, Google 2018

That’s fine, when pages have only signals from internal links on your site, and the canonical redirect was never a critically important redirect.

When you run into trouble is when the page you are trying to redirect signals from has links from EXTERNAL sources e.g. has some link equity…. Such as backlinks from other websites pointing to page a).

QUOTE: “so if there’s a “redirect” (e.g. a canonical link element from page a) to b))) in place and we do forward those signals if after some time the redirect (to page b)) drops out and a lot of the signals are still applying to the old URL (page a)) then that could be a bit of a problem. (for page b))” John Mueller, Google 2018

Yes, that is a problem for page b) and your website health in general if page a) 404s at some point in the future e.g. disappears completely. You can totally short-cut your rankings if all the signals are pointing to page a) again and you are trying to rank page b).

In my experience, relying on canonicals as redirects is something that should be used only as a temporary measure. Google can, and will, ignore canonical tags for any number of reasons and this could severely impact your traffic a few months down the line if messed up.

QUOTE: “It’s possible that we picked this up and we say oh this is good enough but if the pages are not equivalent if they’re not really the same then it’s also possible that our algorithms look at this and say well this rel canonical is probably accidentally set like this and we should ignore it” John Mueller, Google 2018

If you want to redirect Google and get the most benefit out of your SEO efforts, you should ideally use 301 redirects when you have the option.

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Can I merge multiple domains and redirect them to consolidate rankings?

Say you have multiple older sites that are ranking in Google for a lot of terms and there is an opportunity to redirect them to your primary site – will you keep those Google rankings? Yes, if done properly.

If you keep most of these quality signals intact, merging old domains and redirecting them to similar content shouldn’t be a problem. You MUST simply remember to redirect pages to equivalent content.

Be very careful, though, as Google is under no obligation to redirect domains and transfer rankings, and has said as much.

And it is going to take TIME to see the fruits of your labour:

QUOTE: “This kind of site-merging will always take time, but you make it significantly harder by not doing the merge consistently or cleanly. Redirect them all, set canonicals, crawl all of your old domain URLs to check, etc. A clean migration takes time, a hacky migration with an attempt to get short-term advantages will just take much longer. Aim for the final result.” John Mueller, Google 2018

Make sure these domains are not already blacklisted in Google for previous web spam violations before you implement any redirects!

Getting loads of unnatural links too fast to a domain may invite a Notice of Unnatural Links and an eventual penalty from the webspam team – especially if you own the domains in question, and if your intent is interpreted as manipulation.

QUOTE: “Cleaning up these kinds of link issue can take considerable time to be reflected by our algorithms (we don’t have a specific time in mind, but the mentioned 6-12 months is probably on the safe side)” John Mueller, Google 2018

NOTE: If you are buying domains for redirect purposes, I would ensure they are on topic with the theme of the website your are redirecting to, and even that is not 100% guaranteed to work.

QUOTE: “Sometimes we recognize that a new site is completely unrelated to an old site. So for example if you go out and buy an old domain name, it might have been a church website for 10 years. If we recognise your new website is really not the same as it was, then we need to understand that difference and say that, these links, they apply to the old website but they don’t apply to the new one.” John Mueller, Google 2016

Googles Matt Cutts said something similar a decade ago:

QUOTE: “Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links” Matt Cutts, Google, 2008

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Case study

I needed to 301 an ageing, out-of-date satellite site (or mini-site) into the principal website of the company I was employed by.

The goal was to keep visitors and Google rankings.

Managing multiple sites in a niche usually means some of those sites get neglected. Often, a lot of the mini-sites won’t get the required time and effort it takes to actually convert the traffic earned to leads and sales.

Information on satellite sites can often end up more out-of-date than the primary site. In this case, the decision was made to redirect lower-quality mini sites to the main corporate site to ensure the more conversion friendly corporate site ranked for the competitive term the mini-site had earned.

The image below shows the results when I redirected a mini-site that ranked no1 for a valuable query to the main site.

This was a long time ago but it still works almost exactly today as it did then.

You can see from the illustration above and below when I achieved the no1 position with the satellite site, the actual corporate site was actually heading in a slightly different direction.

Essentially I wanted to make the main company site (in Green) be the number one result, and basically, I wanted the mini-site to disappear from Google but transfer all its good rankings (as well as 600 visitors a day) to the corporate site.

The end result is always (if done correctly) very satisfying as:

The images illustrate it worked exactly as expected.

The result of this simple strategy was a ‘new’ no1 position, with better branding and better conversion attributes, and 600 more visitors to the main site each day. It’s still like that today.

Things work very much the same although Google has raised the quality bar in some instances, and I would be careful.

Can I 301 multiple outdated pages to a new higher quality page?

QUOTE: “Don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant destination, such as the home page of the new site. This can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error. However, if you have consolidated content previously hosted on multiple pages to a new single page, it is acceptable to redirect the older URLs to that new, consolidated page.” Google Webmaster Guidelines, 2021

YES. Sometimes content becomes stale and you end up with lots of pages that are essentially redundant in Google. Sometimes, this type of content can actually hurt your rankings in Google.

You can permanently redirect any and all out-of-date content to equivalent new pages that stand a better chance of ranking in Google for important keywords.

Google advises server-side redirects are OK for this purpose – and so are CANONICAL LINK ELEMENTS – so I use them.

You can change the focus of a redirect but that’s a bit black hat for me and can be abused – I don’t really talk about that sort of thing on this blog.

But it’s worth knowing. You also need to keep these redirects in place in your .htaccess file going forward. Redirecting multiple old pages to one new page works for me, if the text-based information, and especially target key phrases, is mentioned, and prominent, on the new page.

In my own experience, and confirmed by talking to some people who worked at Google, I can say that a 301 redirect is usually only permanent until Google recrawls the links – so, these redirects CAN be changed later, although if you know the redirect will be temporary, you are recommended (by Google and Bing) to use a 302 Temporary redirect.

I usually employ 301s and have changed them back and forth multiple times over the years, with no issues.

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Do pages need to be identical for 301 redirects to work?

NO – not in my experience. BUT only redirect users and Googlebot to HIGHLY equivalent pages where possible. Google is getting MORE and MORE strict with this guideline, as detailed by Google’s John Mueller in a recent tweet:

QUOTE: “301-redirecting for 404s makes sense if you have 1:1 replacement URLs, otherwise we’ll probably see it as soft-404s and treat like a 404.” John Mueller, Google, 2017

A good rule of thumb with any redirects (that you want to get the most benefit from) is to give visitors what they are expecting when they click on a link.

I often redirect many old URLs to one URL – if it’s relevant and a good user experience – but I avoid redirecting irrelevant pages to irrelevant destinations.

My general rule of thumb is to make sure the information (and keywords) on the old page are present in the new page copy.

Most SEO already know the power of a redirect, and how you (could, at least historically) use a 301 redirect to push even totally unrelated pages to the top of Google (for a time – sometimes a very long time.

Google is much better at preventing this sort of manipulation.

Can I transfer a Google penalty to my new domain with redirects?

This is a grey area but essentially yes. Do due diligence on any domain you are redirecting to your main site – you don’t want to redirect a site you own with a toxic link profile to your primary website, for instance. I would disavow those links first at the source website AND add those links to your own website disavow file.

There are nuances to this.

For instance, if you OWN BOTH SITES, and one is penalised or has a manual action against it from the webspam team, you are not going to lift the penalty just by redirecting the domain to another domain.

If you want to transfer old positive signals to your new domain, things need to be equivalent on the new domain. If things are 100% equivalent e.g. you have just cloned the site content, then Google may well transfer the negative signals from the old domain to the new domain – and they even attempt to this WITHOUT redirects in place in some cases (probably as an anti-spam measure):

QUOTE: “It kind of depends on how we find the website but if it’s essentially the same website just on a different domain then we’ll see that still as a kind of a site move and forward those links as well so if you start a completely different or new website on a new domain then that’s something we’ll see that as something completely separate whereas if you essentially copy the whole side to new domain then that’s still kind of a site move for us. It’s not a great site move it’s not one where I say this is a recommended way to move a website but we still see that essentially this is the same content this content move to a different domain and we can try to forward the signals ….. if we if we can recognize that this is essentially a site move that was just done incorrectly then we’ll try to help the webmaster by by treating it appropriately we sometimes see that for example if you’re on a free host or you can’t set up redirect or for some reason you have a technical problem on your server and you can’t set up redirect will try to pick that up and use that as a kind of a site move type it’s not a great way to handle a site move so if you really want to move your website then you should try to do the 301 redirects but if you can’t do the redirects we can sometimes help out algorithmically….” John Mueller, Google

So – you can NEGATIVE SEO yourself, in practice, but this is much harder to do if you are trying to negative SEO a domain you do not own, by just redirecting toxic links to another domain.

Bear in mind, though, while many SEO claim negative SEO is ‘easy’, Google says:

QUOTE: “we haven’t seen a single case a single one where those toxic link campaigns work” Gary Illyes Nov 2016

… and in my experience, you can certainly ‘negative SEO’ yourself!

You can even essentially ‘negative SEO’ yourself by not implementing a switch to HTTPS properly!

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Use 301 redirects to switch your website to HTTPS

Like many SEO, I’ve naturally been telling all my clients to consider switching to HTTPS asap since Google said to a few years back to do so.

NOT because of any claimed ranking boost, but because it is the trend that Google prefers HTTPS – and it is more secure.

Google Chrome Will Mark Your HTTP Website ‘insecure’.

Now that Google Chrome is marking your website ‘insecure’ if it is NOT HTTPS, it is probably time to make switching to HTTPS a priority if it hasn’t been up to now.

This is quite a different issue, especially if you sell online, or take people’s information, and is just another example of the web evolving to focus on security and quality.

Time permitting, I still think you should clean your site up (e.g. remove redundant pages) before a switch to https to get the maximum benefit from such a move.

That time, though, may have run out.

Obviously, Chrome marking your site insecure could well be a sales conversion killer.

Why Is Google Chrome Marking My Website Insecure?

This goes way back to 2014, and is not unexpected:

QUOTE: “Proposal – We, the Chrome Security Team, propose that user agents (UAs) gradually change their UX to display non-secure origins as affirmatively non-secure. We intend to devise and begin deploying a transition plan for Chrome in 2015. The goal of this proposal is to more clearly display to users that HTTP provides no data security.“ GOOGLE, 2014

QUOTE: “Chrome pushing forward on marking plain HTTP as outright insecure is an incredibly strong and pro-user move,” Eric Mill, a technologist who’s been working on web encryption, told Motherboard. ”Despite how common plain HTTP can still be today, it *is* outright insecure, and a real and present danger to users and to the open web.” Google

Should I move my website to HTTPS?

Do you need to register the HTTPS version of a site as a ‘change of address’ in Google Search Console?

No. A Google spokesperson said (2017):

QUOTE: ‘We treat already automatically propagate signals between HTTP and HTTPS, so a site move request in GSC would be placebo’ Gary Illyes, 2017

Clean up your site before a changeover To HTTPS

While not absolutely necessary, when I say clean up my site before I move to HTTPS, I mean:

Essentially – I work with sites with a lot of site-quality issues, and fixing them before you move has benefits in managing the site and anything you need to do in the future.

Moving to HTTPS can add a layer of complexity to some sites, so in some cases, cleaning up before you move makes analysing the impact easier, later.

As an SEO, telling clients to move to https (which is going to probably negatively impact organic traffic levels for up to a few weeks at least (sometimes months)) is not exactly news they want to hear.

This is compounded by the fact that Quality Rating Issues on a site are more important to tackle heads on, than prioritising moving to a secure server for an elusive ranking boost.

Moving to HTTPS is important from a security point of view, of course, but fixing quality issues is more important for me (as that is what I am hired to do).

I think, though, with this (not unexpected) move from Google chrome, migrating to HTTPS is going to have to be up there as a priority too.

Both for security reasons and conversion reasons.

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Do I need to register my site with Google Search Console?

YES. Make sure your site is a manageable shape, then:

I have witnessed fallout in early instances where a disavow was in place on the HTTP site, but not migrated to the https version by Google. Google neglected to point out to us in the beginning that that was necessary.

It could be said that Google prioritises migrating a penalty to another totally different domain over migrating the preventive penalty measures you put in place in good faith in a switch to https on the same domain.

That seems a little unhelpful.

You can ask yourself why we need the unnecessary complication of 4 versions of Webmaster tools, and 4 disavow files to manage all this, to ‘optimise’ a website in organic listings.

But – I would not switch to https without registering with Search Console first.

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Google’s advice on moving to HTTPS

The following advice is from John Mueller, 2016:

Planning on moving to HTTPS? Here are 13 FAQs! help center at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543

# Will the rel=canonical guarantee that the HTTP URL is indexed? No, but it’s a very strong signal when picking the indexed URL.

# What’s the next step after testing? Follow our site-move documentation (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049 ). Use 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS, confirm the new version by adding a rel=canonical on the HTTPS page, pointing to itself, and submit sitemaps including both HTTP & HTTPS URLs with new change-dates (in the long run, just keep the HTTPS sitemap).

# What about the robots.txt file? The HTTPS site uses the HTTPS robots.txt file. Check that it’s reachable or serves a 404 result code, and check that your HTTP URLs aren’t blocked by the HTTP robots.txt file.

# Is it OK to have just some pages on HTTPS? Yes, no problem! Start with a part, test it, add more.

# Should I move everything together, or is it fine to do sections? Moving in sections is fine.

# Which certificate do I need? For Google Search, any modern certificate that’s accepted by modern browsers is acceptable.

# Do I lose “link juice” from the redirects? No, for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS no PageRank is lost.

# Will we see search keywords in Google Analytics when we’re on HTTPS? This won’t change with HTTPS, you can see the search queries in Search Console.

# How can I test how many pages were indexed? Verify HTTP / HTTPS separately in Search Console, use Index Status for a broad look, or the sitemaps indexed counts for sitemap URLs.

# How long will a move from HTTP to HTTPS take? There are no fixed crawl frequencies, it depends on the size of your site, and the speed of crawling that’s possible. The move takes place on a per-URL basis.

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How do you implement 301 redirects on Apache servers?

It takes only a few lines of code to achieve this change of address in some instances. It is usually a simple if sometimes drawn out process.

The time it takes to complete a typical project is dependent on how large and how complex the website is if you are aiming to redirect the entire site, including internal pages, to exactly the correct urls on the new site.

Success is often dependent on your access to particular files on your host server, or the CMS your website is constructed with.

I can discuss my experience with Apache servers where I use “.htaccess” files and 301 permanent redirects. NOTE – some of this code may need to be modified depending on your setup:

EXAMPLE: Redirecting to a new domain: ( NOTE: on Linux servers, you need the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled):

EXAMPLE – Redirecting one version of your domain to the WWW version of your domain

EXAMPLE – Redirecting one page on a site to another equivalent page on the same domain:

With a 301 permanent redirect instruction at your server level, the age, authority, and reputation of your old website in Google are transferred to this new web address.

With visitors redirected as soon as you apply the 301 redirects, search engines soon notice the change of address. If you have a very large and complex site, it could take a long time for Google to completely forget about your old site.

Upon successful implementation, the new domain ranks where the old domain once ranked.

This method has worked for most professionals for over twenty years and still works today.

You can also tell Google you’ve made the change, too, but Google still needs you to also stick to traditional methods like I describe above as well as registering any change at Google Webmaster Tools (AKA Google Search Console).