How to transfer your website and maintain your search ranking

Filed under: Research » Search Results, Search Marketing » Organic Search,

Moving your website to a new server? Or a new domain name?

There are many reasons to decide to move a website. These range from moving to a new server because you've decided to switch hosting providers, to simply redirecting your existing files to a new domain name. Either way, when you move your website, your search engine rankings may be affected. Here's some common website moving methods that will affect your search engine rankings if all you do is move your website, without letting the search engines know you did:

Reasons you might want to move your website

Moving to a new server : you may be moving to a new server because your current hosting company is experiencing too much downtime, or has crappy customer service, or maybe even because you need to upgrade from a shared hosting to a dedicated environment because of an increase in online traffic or bandwidth consumption.
Moving to a new domain name : you may be moving your website because you've found a spiffy new domain name that you like much better than your current one. Or maybe you finally got enough cash together to buy the name you've been eyeing for a while.

Whatever the reason for moving your website, it's important that you move not only your live files, which are the ones hosted directly on your server - ie. the ones you upload and edit every day (or, if you're using a CMS such as Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal, the values stored in a database that are affected directly when you login to edit a page), but also your pages indexed in search engines.

How do I know what pages are indexed in search engines?

To find out which of your pages are indexed in search engines, you can query the search engine. Each search engine uses a different method for this:

Google : type "site:example.com" to get a listing of pages indexed. You can click on "show omitted results" on the last page to get them all.
Yahoo : the same, except you will be redirected to Yahoo's Site Explorer. To search directly via Site Explorer, visit it at siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN Live : Click on "advanced search", select "Site/ Domain" and then "Look for results only in the following site or domain."

Each search engine will return a list of indexed pages, along with a number of how many pages are indexed. You'll want to go through these and redirect each one to your new website.

Setting and maintaining your 301 permanent redirects

If your new website is simply moving to a new server, and you are keeping your domain name, all you will need to do is keep both sites up for a few weeks to ensure the search engines are aware of the switch. If, however, you are using a new domain name, you will need to physically program 301 (permanent) redirects for all your pages. We recommend leaving the 301 redirects up indefinitely, as some pages take longer to redirect than others. To find out how to implement 301 redirects using various programming languages and server systems, visit our article on search friendly domain and file redirects.

View Comments

Maintaining SERP positions

Submitted by a searcher adrift amidst an ocean of information on July 29, 2011 - 9:38am.

It's unbelievable to me how many web design firms will snatch clients from other firms and not bother to help them maintain their search engine rankings. I realize it's either more work than they'd like to do or they are unaware of the traffic they're losing their client, but both reasons are unacceptable considering the years it can take for the client to rebuild their index of pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Also try Google webmaster tools for moving a website

Submitted by a searcher adrift amidst an ocean of information on June 23, 2011 - 2:34pm.

There's a new option for moving a site to a new domain - using the move domain option in Google's Webmaster Tools (doesn't work for sub-domains at this time). You still want to use 301's though. I used this method on my blog Optimo Web Tips and all seems well.

Website uptime and search ranking

Submitted by a searcher adrift amidst an ocean of information on March 21, 2011 - 8:20am.

Many people are afraid to change their web hosting provider even if they are unhappy, because they are afraid of longer downtime of their website or loosing their search ranking. If you really care about search engine rankings, minimize your use of Flash, Silverlight, Java and JavaScript. Irena

Transferring website to new server

Submitted by a searcher adrift amidst an ocean of information on April 28, 2009 - 11:59pm.

Great information - I can't believe how we used to just shut down the old website and forget about it. To think about all the traffic we lost! Any chance you know approximately how long we need to keep the old website up? Is there a way to confirm when the pages have been re-indexed?

Confirming re-indexing of pages

Submitted by Guru of Search on May 8, 2009 - 1:50pm.

Try typing "site:example.com" (replace example.com with your old domain name) into Google. If you don't see any links to your old pages, they have been re-indexed. You'll probably also want to verify, using the same technique, that your new pages are indexed.