Google announced on their Webmaster Central blog today that they have released an in-depth guide to Googlebot-friendly site movies.
“Few topics confuse and scare webmasters more than site moves,” Google says. So to make things less scary they have created this guide that explains how to handle site moves and stay on Google’s good side.
For those unfamiliar with sites moves, and how to move a site correctly, Google runs down the basics.
Basics of site moves
Google explains sites moves as being one of two types of content migrations:
Site moves without URL changes. This is where you’re changing your site’s content management system, or hosting provider, but still keeping the same URL. For example, you might move www.example.com to a different hosting provider while keeping the same URLs and site structure on www.example.com.
Site moves with URL changes. Here, the URLs on the website change in any number of ways:
- The protocol: http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
- The domain name: example.com to example.net
- The URL paths: http://example.com/page.php?id=1 to http://example.com/widget
Google covers both types of site moves in great detail in their new guide.
Google says they have seen instances where webmasters implemented site moves incorrectly, or simply missed out steps that would have resulted in a successful site move.
To help webmasters design and implement site moves correctly, Google has updated the site move guidelines in its Help Center. Google will also continue to improve its crawling and indexing systems to detect and handle site moves for sites that follow Google’s guidelines.
