Best Practices for Moving a Web Site

Will Moving Your Web Site Affect Search Engine Rankings?

I get this question often, making it the perfect subject to address in the Blog, but the quick answer, like most quick answers, is that it depends.

Sometimes, web owners simply want to change the domain name of their web site; but, there can be a million reasons why web site owners may need to change web hosts:

• Poor hosting company service
• Limited current infrastructure
• Web host out of business
• Price volatility

Whatever reasons a web site owner may have for moving to a new IP, host, or domain, the effects of the change on current search rankings can be minimized, if not eliminated, by following some very simple guidelines.

Moving to a new domain

For example: changing from www.speedracer.com, to www.fastguy.com

If moving to a new domain, but staying in your current hosting environment, there are some very easy things you can do to ensure that your users, and search engine spiders, experience limited interruption:

301 Redirects

301 redirects permanently redirect pages from your old web site domain to the new one. For example, if your current About Us page is www.speedracer.com/aboutus.html, you would create a 301 redirect that points all references to the old page to the new About Us page at www.fastguy.com/aboutus.php

Please note: Many developers take a shortcut and just redirect the entire old domain, and thus all its pages, to the new domain's home page. This is not the optimal way to do this. It will create difficulty and confusion for your users, so guess what it will do for your search rankings as well.

Don't do it.

Take the time to 301 each individual page. We offer a 301 redirect tutorial here.

Check your links

Ensure that all the internal links within your web site are now pointing to the new domain name and it's equivalent or relevant web page. I strongly suggest, if possible, that you move the site BEFORE any redesign or redevelopment occurs. This allows the search engines to become comfortable with the new structure and properly index all the pages within the new domain.

For external links, consult your web analytics and use the big three search engines' backlink checkers to find external sites linking to your site. Contact as many of the webmasters of these sites as possible and inform them of the change. Most webmasters will be happy to accommodate this request as it improves their reliability and site integrity as well. I advise participating in Google, Yahoo, and MSN webmaster tool offerings to stay abreast of what sites are linking to you as well.

Webmaster Tools:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• MSN Webmaster Central

Create, or migrate, the sitemap

Sitemaps are key to ensuring that Google can find all of your pages in your domain. While it's typically enough to have a sitemaps page somewhere in your navigation, purists insist that also adding an XML sitemap to each of your webmaster tools accounts above is the sure fire why to succeed with sitemaps.

At phatz, we do both.

Sniff out those 404 Errors

Lastly, get in the habit of reviewing your web site logs and webmaster tools to look for broken links, typically reported as 404 errors. Any page that is generating a 404 error needs to be redirected to its equivalent or relevant counterpart on the new site.

404s are bad. Pay attention.

Moving to a New IP, or New Web Site Host

Ah, so you're taking the plunge to a unique IP, ...or perhaps, dropping that lame web host that keeps charging you extraneous charges for nothing.

Good for you.

The good news is, it's not much different than the examples above. The key difference is understanding DNS (Domain name Service)

Here's the basic steps:

• Go ahead and copy all the content from the old IP, or web host, to the new one.
• Leave a complete, functional copy of the web site on the old host and do so for at least two weeks.
• Modify the TTL value of your current domain name configuration wherever your DNS is hosted. By creating a very short TTL, like 60 seconds, it will force browsers to re-check your site's IP address every minute and prevent users from getting the old site.
• Modify the A record in your DNS settings to officially point your domain to the new IP address.
• Each day, or every couple of days, review your web analytics for the new IP/Domain; and when you see that Googlebot, YahooSlurp and other search engine spider bots are crawling the new IP, you can feel comfortable the search engines are aware of the change.

That's pretty much it. Any questions?

Am I good?

Yes, if you follow these guidelines, you can ensure that you will experience the least amount of search ranking interruption and provide a smooth domain transition for both your users and the search engines.

Good luck.