Google Adsense Domain Migration: The Planning

Lately, my website has been gaining great traffic, and I’m truly grateful for that — especially you: human readers.

It makes me happy to keep writing more content. The fact that people are actually reading what I write is something I never expected, especially in this age of AI.

There’s also another thing I’ve been planning to do.

I’ve been meaning to buy a .com domain for rebranding, and I thought this might be a good time to do it before someone else snatches it.

So I purchased juniandev.com and plan to redirect every page from junian.net to juniandev.com.

The reason I chose this domain name — even though it’s longer — is to match my overall branding, especially with my YouTube channel.

Technically, this domain migration is not a problem for me. Doing a 301 permanent redirect is easy.

But I do have concerns about Google AdSense.

The Problems with Google AdSense Domain Migration

As you know, I use Google AdSense to monetize my website. I understand that many people have controversial opinions about ads, but this is currently the only way I can keep the site running without a paywall.

The thing is, Google AdSense has become stricter every year when it comes to approving new websites for monetization.

Even if you’re using an existing Google AdSense account, Google will review any new domain you add as if it were a brand-new website.

Here’s what I see when I’m about to submit my new domain for review. There are four different statuses:

• Getting ready: We’re running some checks on your site. This usually takes a few days, but in some cases it can take 2–4 weeks.
• Ready: This site is ready to show ads, but make sure that you follow our Program policies at all times. The Policy Center contains detailed information about policy issues on your site.
• Requires review: Your site hasn’t been checked yet. Click Request review to start the review process. Or, your site is inactive and needs another review.
• Needs attention: You need to fix some issues before your site is ready to show ads.

As you can see, they expect the review process to take up to four weeks. But I’ve also read stories where it took even longer.

These are the risks I see if I migrate the domain before it’s accepted for AdSense:

1. If I redirect everything from junian.net to juniandev.com now, the new domain won’t show any ads, and I’ll receive $0 in revenue for up to four weeks — or longer.
2. Another option is to run both domains with the same content. But doing that carries the risk that the new domain could be rejected due to duplicate or non-original content.
3. There is also a risk that the new domain will have lower search engine rankings because it hasn’t been indexed yet, although this can be minimized by properly setting up 301 permanent redirects from the old domain to the new one.

The Google AdSense Domain Migration Plan

I can’t take the risk of getting no revenue during that period.

The only thing I can think of for now is to write original content for the new domain that closely matches the niche of my existing domain. Then, after about four weeks, I’ll submit it for AdSense review.

So here’s the plan I’m going to execute:

1. Keep running junian.net as usual and continue publishing new content regularly.
2. Copy the theme and structure of junian.net to juniandev.com, but start fresh as if it’s a new website.
3. Create /about/, /contact/, and /privacy-policy/ pages.
4. Register juniandev.com with Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.
5. Register juniandev.com with Bing Webmaster Tool and submit the sitemap.
6. Since I’m using Cloudflare as the proxy, I’ll also activate IndexNow on Cloudflare for faster indexing by search engines.
7. Register juniandev.com in Google Analytics, using the same Measurement ID as junian.net.
8. Create backlinks to juniandev.com from junian.net and from my GitHub profile using automated RSS GitHub Actions.
9. Publish new, original content daily on juniandev.com that closely matches the niche of junian.net, without duplicating content.
10. Add the AdSense ads.txt file, but don’t submit the site for review yet.
11. After about four weeks (28 days), submit juniandev.com for AdSense review.
12. If juniandev.com is accepted, copy the content and redirect everything from junian.net to juniandev.com.
13. If it’s rejected, repeat the process for up to three months.
14. Worst-case scenario: if it keeps getting rejected, I’ll move the content from juniandev.com back to junian.net and redirect juniandev.com to junian.net.

I’ve already completed steps 1 through 10.

Right now, I need to write content for both junian.net and juniandev.com.

It’s double the effort for the same revenue over the next four weeks.

Whatever the final result is, I hope it’s worth it.

In about 28 days from now, I’ll write a follow-up report. Stay tuned!

Final Thoughts

That’s it for this blog post. I hope it’s somewhat useful.

As usual, if you have any questions or a better method, leave a comment below. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!