How to correctly move subdomain to subfolder (google webmaster)?

[PavelGro92]

Hello,

This is my first post in here

I just wondered what is the correct way to move a subdomain to subfolder?

I've moved it, re-done sitemap, so that main website would include a subfolder, as they are part of one big website now (it was something like a blog on a subdomain).

Subdomain now does correct 301 redirects.

Submitted new sitemap to google, asked google to re-fetch the whole domain (thus subfolder should be re-fetched too, as it's part of main nav).

The areas i'm in doubt:

I can tell google that the domain got moved, however it is moved to the one that is already approved in the same account, but is in a subfolder, so should i do this? Or should i simply somehow erase it on webmaster?

The blog was launched about a month ago, and it isn't perfectly optimized yet, it wasn't on google SERPs pretty much at all, excluding googling it straightly, and there are pretty much 0 traffic from google, almost all of it is either direct either referral, mostly social,

Thanks,

Pavel

[Forusall]

I'm just made a similar move, moving my blog from blog.domain.com to domain.com/my-blog.

I don't think I can use the Google change of address - it is throwing me an error when I get to that step in the change of address because I'm going to a sub directory, not to the root. "The old site redirects to www.domain.com/my-blog, which does not correspond to the new site you chose."

Should I care? I'm getting organic traffic already on the blog URLs, and Google has indexed about half of the URLs that I submitted via the sitemap.

[MattRoney]

Yep! Sounds like that'd be the right thing to do. : Given the situation you'd probably be fine just resubmitting your XML sitemap—your main domain isn't changing; it's just getting a new subfolder—but I can't imagine it'd hurt.

[PavelGro92]

Thanks for such a quick response!

0 Traffic isn't an issue, as it's for blog only, and i'll solve it

The thing that concerns me is that on google change of address - it refers to subdomain movement to another domain, so i.e. in google webmasters i got:

blog.mywebsite.com

mywebsite.com

Now blog was moved to mywebsite.com/blog

So i should submit new address to mywebsite.com, thus the one i already have in google webmaster console?

Thanks :S

[Joe.Robison]

Here are some best practices based on your situation:

• Make sure you've used the change of address tool for the subdomain - "Request an address change.
  Use the **Change of address **tool when your site move entails a domain or subdomain change, such as changing from http://fish.example-petstore.com to http://example.com or http://example-petstore.com." See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
• Also - one thing to do with your XML sitemaps is to ensure that both your old and new XML sitemaps are still submitted to Search Console. This will allow Google to read the old and the new. When it reads the old XML sitemap it will follow those URLs and redirects to find and index the new URLs. You can remove the old sitemap only when all of your new URLs are indexing to your standards.
• If you're getting 0 traffic from Google, check your Search Analytics in Search Console to make sure you're actually ranking for at least long tail keywords. 0 traffic means there's a problem. Check your robots.txt and Meta Robots to ensure everything is properly set up. Do a "site:yoursitename.com/blog" search in Google to make sure your blog URLs are ranking. Also search for your website name to make sure the blog is ranking for the site name at least.

Good luck!