Site moves often frightens and baffles than anything else but Google introduced a way to avoid such unwanted happenings. The giant search engine created a detailed guide which guides webmasters regarding how they can manage site moves in a Googlebot friendly way.
You might be wondering what is site move and how I go about moving a site correctly? Here to how:
A site move entails any of the two types of content migrations:
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Site moves devoid of URL changes but rather the underlying infrastructure serving the website changes without any detectable changes to the URL layout. For instance, you might move www.example.com to another host while keeping the same URLs and site structure on www.example.com.
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Site moves with URL changes. On this one, the URLs on the website change in any couple of ways such as:
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The protocol: http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
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The domain name: example.com to example.net
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The URLs paths: http://example.com/page.php?id=1 to http://example.com/widget
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Web Trend Analysts, Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji argue said, “We’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.”
They added, “To help webmasters design and implement site moves correctly, we’ve updated the site move guidelines in our Help center. In parallel we continue to improve our crawling and indexing systems to detect and handle site moves if you follow our guidelines.”
Moving to responsive web design
You would wonder as to how can a website move from having a separate mobile URLs or dynamic serving to using responsive web design? In order to execute this configuration, Google advises that you visit the new page on its smartphones recommendations site.