Thursday, June 11, 2009

Tell Google When You Moved a Site

If you’re changing from one domain to another for your website, it’s good practice to use a permanent redirect header for all the old pages. Added to that, you can now let Google know of the move in a new Webmaster Tools section called “Change of address”. “This will help us update our index faster and smooth the transition for your users,” Google says.

A theoretical problem with configuring settings like these in the Google Webmaster Tools is that other search engines are locked out of your preferences, unless you’d mundanely repeat them for all search engines which would want to support them. Formats like robots.txt or Sitemaps.xml are more open in these regards – though probably also tougher to agree on, if you’re looking for standards to apply across all major search engines. (For this particular setting, permanent redirect headers may be the standard here already; however, even unauthorized sites could point a redirect to your site.)

Back in 2007, I moved this domain from blog.outer-court.com to blogoscoped.com... after a couple of months, I were able to check in on some of the results.

[Thanks WebSonic!]

Tell Google When You Move ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+1)

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