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Ok, this could get confusing so please stick with me, apologies if I don't explain it properly.

I think we are about to do this correctly but I would really love it if someone could please confirm this for me:

We moved our website content from www.belzona.com to www.belzona.com/en/ a few months ago, making sure there were 301 redirects for all the old pages pointing to the "/en/" versions.

We had a single Webmaster site set up for www.belzona.com and a separate one for www.belzona.de (old translated content on a separate site)

We are about to launch a German version of the main site at www.belzona.com/de/ and an so will set up both a "www.belzona.com/de/" site and a "www.belzona/en/" version in Google Webmaster tools.

So far so good. My questions is, am I ok to do a "change of address" on the main site profile and change it to "www.belzona.com/"?

Also if I do this, should I set up a sitemap index on the root that points to both www.belzona.com/en/sitemap_en.xml and www.belzona.com/de/sitemap_de.xml

Then submit the individual sitemaps on each site in webmasters?

Im pretty sure after reading up about it all that this is the correct thing to do but with it being our most important site, I want to make sure.

Thanks, Stuart.

Edit: Ok, so its not possible to move the site like that in Webmaster tools, you can only move it to another domain.

Am I still right to submit the sitemaps separately with a sitemap index on the root of the site?

Pyper
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Just keep a sitemap with all the directories on the main domain.

And p.s. in webmaster tools you can geographically target regions using sub-folders e.g. /en/ and /de/ so that will help with SEO.

Jack
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  • It doesn't seem possible to geographically target sub-folders unless you set them up as separate sites in webmaster tools I have done this now and submitted a sitemap index file to the main domain with seperate "en" and de" sitemaps. The subfolder sites in webmaster tools now say they have no sitemap submitted though, do you know if I will be penalised if I submit the individual sitemaps in the sub-folder sites as well as the main one? – Pyper Sep 25 '13 at 09:40
  • There's no reason why they'd penalize you for that, go ahead :-) – Jack Sep 25 '13 at 15:05