Google Updates Documentation & Guidelines On Moving A Site

Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji, posted on the Google Webmaster blog today that they’ve updated their official guidelines for moving your web site and having Google in mind when doing so.

They broke out the process based on two ways of moving your site:

(1) Move a site with no URL change

(2) Move a site with URL changes

With the first, i.e. no URL change, this is typically when you upgrade your site’s content management system to a new platform and you have the same domain name and URLs, but you may move the site to a new hosting company.

The second, i.e. with URL changes, is typically when the URL changes, such as the protocol URL, i.e. https://www.example.com to https://www.example.com, the domain name changes, i.e. example.com to example.net and/or the URL paths change, i.e. https://example.com/page.php?id=1 to https://example.com/widget.

Google said they’ve “seen cases where webmasters implemented site moves incorrectly, or missed out steps that would have greatly increased the chances of the site move completing successfully.” Because of this, they’ve upgraded their content in the
moving your web site guidelines to help webmasters along the process.

You can view the updated guidelines over here.