Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Musings on Down Under

Webmaster Central Blog

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Musings on Down Under

Friday, May 11, 2007

Posted by Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search QualitySearch SummitSearch Engine Room

For each page on domain X, have it 301-redirect to the corresponding page on Y. (How? Typically through .htaccess, but check with your hosting provider).

You might want to stagger the move, and redirect sub-sections of your site over time. This gives you the chance to keep an eye on the effects, and also gives search engines' crawl/indexing pipelines time to cover the space of redirected URLs.

http://www.google.com/webmasters is your friend. Keep an eye on it during the transition to make sure that the redirects are having the effect you want.

Give it time. How quickly the transition is reflected in the results depends on how quickly we recrawl your site and see those redirects, which depends on a lot of factors including the current reputation of your site's pages.

Don't forget to update your Sitemap. (You are using Sitemaps, aren't you?)

If possible, don't substantially change the content of your pages at the same time you make the move. Otherwise, it will be difficult to tell if ranking changes are due to the change of content or incorrectly implemented redirects.