Google’s Webmaster Central blog wrote some best practices for moving your site to a new domain. I am happy with Google’s write up and it is a great first step, but I am a strong advocate of a Google Certified Domain Change process within Webmaster Tools.

In any event, here is a summary of what Google recommends:

• Test moving part of your site to the new domain first.
• Use 301 redirects to notify Google of the change.
• Redirect your pages to the most relevant new page, when possible.
• If you are also rebranding your site, consider first moving the original site and then doing a redesign.
• Make sure your internal links are pointing to the new domain.
• Try to encourage external links to change to the new domain.
• Hold on to the old domain for 180 days
• Register and verify the new site with Webmaster Tools and then submit a sitemap.
• Review crawl errors within Webmaster Tools on both the new and old domain.

I have some additional resources at the Search Engine Roundtable on moving domains.

Related Topics: Google: SEO

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz