When it comes to SEO or digital marketing, you cannot ignore the webmaster guidelines put forward by Google, if you are using its search engine as your primary marketing platform. Also, the search engine giant makes some scary statements time to time regarding the use of SEO strategies in its search results. Nowadays, there has been lots of confusion going on how to move a website without upsetting major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Recently, Google provided a guide that clearly shows how to move, transfer or migrate your website without violating its guidelines.

According to Google, it is possible for a website owner to move his/her website at some point to a different URL or different infrastructure. In its Webmaster Central Blog, Google clearly provides information about what is a site move, how to move your site, usage of change of address tool and withdrawal of change of address. For those who are familiar with the site moves, here is how Google provides us the basics of this tactic.

  • Moving site without changing URL – Without making any visible changes to the URL structure, only the underlying infrastructure such as your site’s content management system or hosting provider is changed. For example, you want to move www.xyz.com to a different web hosting provider while keeping www.xyz.com as the same URL structure for your website. 
  • Moving your site with change in URL – According to Google, you move your site with change in URL structure and it can be done in any number of ways. There are three ways of doing it – changing protocol from http to https, from one domain name to another (.com to .net or vice-versa), changing URL paths (xyz.com/page.php?id=1 to xyz.com/widget)

 Google also detailed information on configuring your site to serve both mobile and desktop users by visiting their developer’s site. Based on Google’s Webmaster blog, site redesign is not considered as a site move and Google has offered two simple recommendations to all website owners out there on how to proceed with the site move.

  • Proceed with your site move splitting your migration process into smaller steps. This has to be done because it will be challenging to check for issues that may crop up if you simultaneously change your hosting provider and URL.
  • According to Google, the best time to move your site is when your site is encountering lower search traffic. When you do this way, it will reduces the impact of anything that breaks, and also your server can utilizes its maximum power in helping Googlebot for updating the search engine index.

 

If you perform the site migration process in Google’s way, it won’t affect your SEO rankings and the process will be successful in every way. If you think after moving you site, the traffic has lowered then you can hire professionals who know how to boost up the traffic even greater than you had it before the site move.