Google Updates Site Move Guidelines on Webmaster Tools Help Center

On Friday, June 06, Google has updated an in-depth guide on how to handle site moves in a Googlebot-friendly way. Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Zineb Ait Bahajji and Pierre Far, posted on the Google Webmaster blog that they have updated their official guidelines for moving your site.

As they classifies the site move into one of two types of content migrations

• Site moves without URL changes
• Move a site with URL changes

First, site moves without URL changes – when you upgrade your website content management system to a new hosting provider and you have the same domain name and URLs.

For Example: www.example.com to a different hosting provider while keeping the same URLs and site structure on the same domain name.

Then, move a site with URL changes – when the URLs on the website change in any number of ways such as protocol, domain name and URL paths.

For example:

Protocol: http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
Domain name: example.com to example.net
URL paths: http://example.com/page.php?id=1 to http://example.com/widget.

Google said they’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. To help webmasters design and implement site moves correctly, we’ve updated the site move guidelines in our Help Center.”