How to move your content to a new location

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

While maintaining a website, webmasters may decide to move the whole website or parts of it to a
new location. For example, you might move content from a subdirectory to a subdomain, or to a
completely new domain. Changing the location of your content can involve a bit of effort, but it’s
worth doing it properly.

To help search engines understand your new site structure better and make your site more
user-friendly, make sure to follow these guidelines:

• It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new
  content location using
  301 redirects.
  To highlight the relationship between the two locations, make sure that each old URL points to
  the new URL that hosts similar content. If you’re unable to use 301 redirects, you
  may want to consider using
  cross domain canonicals
  for search engines instead.
• Check that you have both the
  new and the old location verified
  in the same Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the
  Fetch as Googlebot
  feature. It’s important to make sure Google can actually access your content in the new
  location. Also make sure that the old URLs are not blocked by a robots.txt disallow rule,
  so that the redirect or rel=canonical can be found.
• If you’re moving your content to an entirely new domain, use the
  Change of address
  option under Site configuration in Google Webmaster Tools to let us know about the change.
  
• If you’ve also changed your site’s URL structure, make sure that it’s possible to navigate it
  without running into
  404 error pages.
  Google Webmaster Tools may prove useful in investigating
  potentially broken links.
  Just look for
  Crawl errors
  for your new site.
• Check your Sitemap and verify that it’s up
  to date.
• Once you’ve set up your
  301 redirects, you
  can keep an eye on users to your
  404 error pages
  to check that users are being redirected to new pages, and not accidentally ending up on broken
  URLs. When a user comes to a 404 error page on your site, try to identify which URL
  they were trying to access, why this user was not redirected to the new location of your
  content, and then make changes to your 301 redirect rules as appropriate.
• Have a look at the
  Links to your site
  in Google Webmaster Tools and inform the important sites that link to your content about your
  new location.
• If your site’s content is specific to a particular region you may want to double check the
  geotargeting
  preferences for your new site structure in Google Webmaster Tools.
• As a general rule of thumb, try to avoid running two crawlable sites with completely or largely
  identical content without a 301 redirection or specifying a
  rel="canonical".
• Lastly, we recommend not implementing other major changes when you’re moving your content to a
  new location, like large-scale content, URL structure, or navigational updates. Changing too
  much at once may confuse users and search engines.

We hope you find these suggestions useful. If you happen to have further questions on how to move
your content to a new location we’d like to encourage you to drop by our
Google Webmaster Help Forum
and seek advice from expert webmasters.

Written by
Fili Wiese
(Ad Traffic Quality) &
Kaspar Szymanski
(Search Quality)