Thursday, April 17, 2008

Google’s Tips for Moving Your Website
By Tony Ruscoe

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about best practices to follow when moving your site from one domain to another without losing your Google rankings. Here are the main points:

• Test your processes by moving only one directory or subdomain first. Check to see whether those pages are appearing in Google’s search results before moving your entire site.
• Don’t just redirect all pages from your old site to the home page of your new site. Try to redirect all pages on your old site to a relevant page on your new site.
• If you’re thinking about changing your domain and redesigning your site at the same time, consider doing these things separately to minimize the risk of error.
• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site (which can be done using Google Webmaster Tools) and try asking webmasters to change any links pointing to your site to use the new domain.
• Don’t allow your old domain to expire until at least 180 days have passed.
• Add your new site to Google Webmaster Tools, verify you own it and submit an XML sitemap containing all the URLs. Keep your old site too so that you can keep an eye out for any errors.

You might also be interested in reading New Design and Move to Blogoscoped.com, Telling Google Your Domain Moved and How This Blog’s Move Went With Google, all of which document how this blog moved to a new domain last year.

Google’s Tips for Moving ... by Tony Ruscoe | Comments (4)

>> More posts

Advertisement