Site Moves & Migrations – What you Need to Know
If you’re dealing with a website migration and want to move to a new domain smoothly, you might be wondering how to do this process without being penalised. Knowing how Google responds to Site Moves & Migrations is key and should put your mind at ease. So let’s find out what Google makes of the process and what you can do to minimise stress.
There’s No Sandbox Effect in a Site Move
Rumour has it that migrated websites will be placed in a sandbox and prevented from ranking until Google susses them out once again. Of course, this is a website owner’s worst nightmare. But is it actually true? Well, the short answer is no. When asked about redirecting a large number of URLs to a new domain and the sandbox effect, Google’s John Mueller said:
“To me this sounds like a traditional site move situation. You move from one domain to another, and you redirect all of the URLs from your old site to a new one and we have to deal with that. And there is, at least from my point of view, there’s nothing like a sandbox effect. There is definitely nothing defined as a sandbox effect on our side when it comes to a site move.”
So that’s a bit of good news at least.
Site Move Best Practice
Site owners have also questioned whether it’s better to migrate URLs in stages to a new domain or do it all at once. According to Mueller:
“If you have to do a site move, then do a site move and redirect all of your pages. It’s often the easiest approach is just to redirect all pages at once. Our systems are also tuned to that a little bit to try to recognize that.”
So with this advice in mind, it seems you should just put your mind to the site migration and get it done, without worrying about confusing the hell out of Google.
Google Processes Site Moves Quickly
It’s also worth noting that Google processes site moves quickly to avoid any ranking disruptions. Again, Mueller had this to say.
“When we see that a website starts redirecting all pages to a different website, then we’ll try to reprocess that a little bit faster so that we can process that site move as quickly as possible. And it’s definitely not the case that we would say, oh they’re doing a site move therefore we will slow things down. But rather we try to process things actually a little bit faster when we recognize there is a site move.”
Let’s think of this logically. Google’s job is to deliver high-level content for specific search queries. Therefore, it makes sense for them to process site moves quickly, as many will involve URLs with highly searchable content. So if you’re planning a site migration in the near future, there’s good reason to believe it won’t be as daunting as you might think.
To improve the ranking of your site through a tailored strategy contact Whitefish Marketing today, a Kent website design agency.
