The six sheets › Sheet VI

Sheet VI of VI

Moving a website: migrations and redirects

To move a site or change its URLs while keeping the harm to your Google Search results as small as possible, map your old URLs to their new ones, then redirect each old URL to its new home with a permanent server-side redirect. After that, it is mostly patience: Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer.

1. Before the move

   Prepare the new site and the map

   • Change one thing at a time. Google’s example: move the domain first, then change the layout, not both at once.
   • Choose a quiet time if your traffic has seasonal or weekly dips.
   • List your old URLs, most important first: from your sitemaps, server logs or analytics, Search Console’s links report, and your CMS. Include images, video, JavaScript and CSS.
   • Map each old URL to a new one, in a database or as rewrite rules for common patterns.
   • Update the new site: a self-referencing rel="canonical" on each new URL, hreflang pointing at new URLs, internal links changed to new URLs.
   • Return 404 or 410 for content you aren’t moving.
   • Verify both sites, every variant, in Search Console (www and non-www, HTTP and HTTPS), and carry over any verification file or tag.
   • If the domain is newly bought, check its history: manual actions for earlier spam, and leftover URL removals from the previous owner.
   • Plan for more crawling; Google crawls a moved site more heavily than usual for a while.

2. Move day

   Turn on the redirects

   • Small or medium site: Google recommends moving all URLs at once. Large sites can move in sections, which makes problems easier to spot.
   • Redirect straight to the final address. Googlebot can follow up to 10 hops, but Google advises ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5, because chains slow users down.
   • Don’t send everything to the home page. Many old URLs redirected to one irrelevant page can confuse users and may be treated as a soft 404. Redirecting several old pages to one page that genuinely merges them is fine.
   • Remove development blocks. Lift any robots.txt or noindex rules that kept the new site hidden, and check canonicals now use the new URLs.
   • Test the redirects with the URL Inspection tool, or with scripts for many URLs.
   • Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.

3. If the domain changed

   Tell Google with Change of Address

   Search Console’s Change of Address tool is for moves from one domain or subdomain to another, used after the site has moved and redirects are working. It isn’t needed for HTTP to HTTPS, www to non-www on the same domain, moving paths within a domain, or a move with no visible URL change.

   You must own both properties with the same Google account, and the tool doesn’t move subdomains, so run it for each verified variant of the old domain, including www and non-www. Google also advises against chaining moves (A to B, then straight on to C) and against folding several sites into one location at once.

4. The weeks after

   Update links and watch both sites

   • Ask sites that link to you to update their links, prioritising those that send the most visits; update your profiles and ad campaigns too.
   • Expect rankings to fluctuate while Google recrawls; Google calls this normal.
   • In Search Console, watch indexed URLs in the old sitemap fall and in the new sitemap rise. Warnings that old URLs redirect are expected.
   • Check server logs for Googlebot and for URLs returning unexpected errors.

5. 180 days, and a year

   Keep the forwarding notes

   After a Change of Address, Search Console shows a move notification for 180 days, and Google asks you to keep redirects for at least that long, and longer while Google Search still sends traffic to them. After the 180-day period, Google treats the old site as unrelated if it is still present and crawlable.

   For any move, Google’s guide says to keep redirects as long as possible, generally at least a year, and from users’ point of view, consider keeping them indefinitely. It also recommends continuing to pay for the old domain for at least a year so nobody else can buy it and use it for malicious purposes.