Migration: Move a site with URL changes #GoogleSEOGuide #s2ep02

This episode describes how to change the URLs of existing pages on your site with minimal impact on your Google Search results. Examples of this kind of site move include:

• Domain name changes such as?example.com?to?example.net?or merging multiple domains or hostnames
• URL paths changes:?example.com/page.php?id=1?to?example.com/widget, or?example.com/page.html?to?example.com/page.htm

URL changes from?HTTP?to?HTTPS are also considered as migration.

FAQs for all site moves with URL changes

• Does Google recommend that you move everything together, or is it fine to move in sections? - Moving in sections is fine.
• How can you test how many pages were indexed? - Verify data for each property separately in Search Console. Use the?Index Status report?for a broad look. Use the?Sitemaps report?to view how many URLs submitted in a sitemap have been indexed.
• How long will it take for Google to recognize URL changes? - There are no fixed crawl frequencies; it depends on the size of your site, and the speed of crawling that's possible. The move takes place on a per-URL basis.
• Do you lose credit for links when you redirect to new URLs? - No, 301 or 302 redirects do not cause a loss in?PageRank.

Prepare the new site

The details of site preparation vary for each site move, but typically you'll do one or more of the following:

? Set up a new content management system?(CMS) and add content to it.

? Transfer images and downloads?(such as PDF documents) that you currently host.

? These might already be getting traffic from Google Search or links, and it's useful to tell users and Googlebot about their new location.

? For a move to HTTPS, get and configure the required TLS certificates on your server.

? Set up a robots.txt for your new site

The robots.txt file for a site controls which areas Googlebot can crawl. Make sure the directives in the new site's robots.txt file correctly reflect the parts you want to be blocked from crawling.

Note that some site owners block all crawling while in development. If you follow this strategy, make sure you prepare what the robots.txt file should look like once the site move starts. Likewise, if you use?noindex?directives during development, prepare a list of URLs from which you'll remove the?noindex?directives when you start the site move.

? Provide errors for deleted or merged content

For content on the old site that will not be transferred to the new site, make sure those orphaned URLs correctly return an HTTP 404 or 410 error response code. You can return the error response code at the old URL in the configuration panel for your new site, or you can create a redirect for a new URL and have that return the HTTP error code.

? Ensure correct Search Console settings

A successful site move depends on correct— and up-to-date —Search Console settings.

If you haven't already,?verify?that you own both the old and new sites in Search Console. Be sure to verify all variants of both the old and new sites. For example, verify?www.example.com?and?example.com, and include both the HTTPS and HTTP site variants if you use HTTPS URLs. Do this for both old and new sites.

? Review the Search Console verification

Make sure your Search Console verification will continue to work after the site move. If you're using a different method of verification, keep in mind that verification tokens may be different when the URL changes.

If you're using the?HTML file method?to verify ownership of your site in Search Console, make sure you don't forget to include your current verification file in your new copy of the site.

Likewise, if you verify ownership with an included file that references?meta tag?or?Google Analytics?to verify ownership, ensure the new CMS copy includes these as well.

? Review any configured settings in Search Console

If you had changed some of the configuration settings in Search Console for your old site, make sure the new site's settings are updated to reflect those changes as well. For example:

• URL parameters: If you've configured URL parameters to control the crawling or indexing of your old URLs, make sure the settings are also applied to the new site if needed.
• Geotargeting: Your old site might have explicit geotargeting, such as a geotargetable domain or a country-coded top-level domain (such as?.co.uk). Apply the same setting to the new site if you want to continue targeting the same region. However, if your site move is meant to help your business expand globally and you do not wish your site to be associated with any country or region, select?Unlisted?in the drop-down list of the Site Settings page.
• Crawl rate: Google recommends not limiting Googlebot's crawl rate in Search Console for both old and new URLs. They advise you don't configure a crawl rate setting, either. Only do this if you know that your site cannot handle Googlebot's volume of crawling. If you have already limited Googlebot's crawl rate for your old site, consider removing it. Google has algorithms that automatically detect that a site move has been implemented and They alter Googlebot's crawling behavior so that our indexing quickly reflects the site move.
• Disavowed backlinks: If you've uploaded a file to disavow links on your old site, Google recommends that you re-upload it again using the Search Console account of the new site.

? Clean up your recently purchased domain

If your new site is for a recently purchased domain, you'll want to make sure it's clean of any outstanding issues from the previous owner. Check the following settings:

• Manual action?for previous spam. For sites that don't comply with our?spam policies, Google is willing to take manual action, such as demoting them or even removing them from our search results altogether. Check the Manual Actions page in Search Console to see if any manual actions have been applied to the new site, and address any problems listed there?before?filing a?reconsideration request.
• Removed URLs. Make sure that there aren't any URL removals left over from the previous owner, especially a site-wide URL removal. Also, before submitting URL removal requests for your content, make sure that you?understand when not to use the URL removals tool.

? Use web analytics

During a site move, it's important to analyze usage on both the old and new sites. Web analytics software can help with this. Typically, web analytics configuration consists of a piece of JavaScript embedded in your pages. The details for tracking different site varies depending on your analytics software and its logging, processing, or filtering settings. Check with your analytics software provider for help. Additionally, if you have been planning to make any configuration changes to your analytics software, now is a good time. If you use Google Analytics, consider creating a new profile for your new site if you want clean separation in your content reports.

? Ensure that your server has enough computing resources

After a migration, Google will crawl your new site more heavily than usual. This is because your site redirects traffic from the old to the new site, and any crawls of the old site will be redirected to the new site, in addition to any other crawling. Ensure that your new site has sufficient capacity to handle the increased traffic from Google.

? Update app links

As soon as your HTTPS pages are ready, update any app links intended to open your web pages in an app when displayed in Google Search results. Update these links to point to the new HTTPS URLs. Redirects won't work for these links; mobile browser clicks will open the page in the browser instead of the app unless you update your app link handling.

It's important to map your old site's URLs to the URLs for the new site. This section describes a number of general approaches you can take to correctly assess the URLs on your two sites and facilitate mapping. The exact details of how you generate this mapping will vary depending on your current website infrastructure and the details of the site move.

Prepare URL mapping

It's important to map your old site's URLs to the URLs for the new site. This section describes a number of general approaches you can take to correctly assess the URLs on your two sites and facilitate mapping. The exact details of how you generate this mapping will vary depending on your current website infrastructure and the details of the site move.

? Determine your old URLs

In the simplest of site moves, you may not need to generate a list of your old URLs. For example, you could use a wildcard server-side redirect if you're changing your site's domain (for example, moving from?example.com?to?example.net).

In more complex site moves, you will need to generate a list of old URLs and map them to their new destinations. How you get a listing of old URLs depends on your current website's configuration, but here are some handy tips:

• Start with your important URLs. To find them:
• Look in your?sitemaps?because it's likely your most important URLs have been submitted in Search Console that way
• Check your server logs or analytics software for the URLs that get the most traffic
• Check the?Links to your site feature?in Search Console for pages that have internal and external links
• Use your content management system,?which can typically provide an easy way to get a listing of all URLs that host content.
• Check your server logs?for URLs that were visited at least once recently. Pick a time period that makes sense for your site, keeping in mind seasonal variations of traffic.
• Include images and videos—Make sure that you include URLs of embedded content in your site move plans: videos, images, JavaScript, and CSS files. These URLs need to be moved in the same way as all other content on your website.

? Create a mapping of old to new URLs

Once you have the listing of old URLs, decide where each one should redirect to. How you store this mapping depends on your servers and the site move. You might use a database, or configure some URL rewriting rules on your system for common redirect patterns.

? Update all URL details

Once you have your URL mapping defined, you'll want to do three things to get the pages ready for the move.

1?? Update annotations?to point to the new URLs in the HTML or sitemaps entry for each page:

• Each destination URL should have a self-referencing?rel="canonical" <link>?tag.
• If the site you moved has multilingual or multinational pages annotated using?rel-alternate-hreflang?annotations, be sure to update the annotations to use the new URLs.
• If the site you moved has a mobile counterpart, make sure you update the?rel-alternate-media?annotations to use the new URLs.?Learn more in our smartphone websites guidelines.

2?? Update internal links.

• Change the internal links on the new site from the old URLs to the new URLs. You can use the mapping generated earlier to help find and update the links as needed.

3?? Save the following lists for your final move:

• A sitemap file containing the new URLs in the mapping. See our documentation about?building a sitemap.
• A list of sites linking to your old URLs. You can find the?links to your site?in Search Console.

? Prepare for 301 redirects

Once you have a mapping and your new site is ready, the next step is to set up?HTTP 301 redirects?on your server from the old URLs to the new URLs as you indicated in your mapping.

Keep in mind the following:

1. Use HTTP 301 redirects.?Although Googlebot supports?several kinds of redirects, Google recommends that you use HTTP 301 redirects if possible.
2. Avoid chaining redirects.?While Googlebot can?follow up to 10 hops?in a "chain" of multiple redirects (for example, Page 1?>?Page 2?>?Page 3), Google advises redirecting to the final destination. If this is not possible, keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5. Chaining redirects add latency for users, and not all user agents and browsers support long redirect chains.
3. Test the redirects.?You can use the?URL Inspection Tool?for testing individual URLs, or command line tools or scripts to test large numbers or URLs.

Start the site move

Once the URL mapping is accurate and the redirects work, you're ready to move.

1?? Decide how you will move your site?— all at once, or in sections:

• Small or medium sites:?Google recommends moving all URLs on your site simultaneously instead of moving one section at a time. This helps users interact with the site better in its new form, and helps our algorithms detect the site move and update our index faster.
• Large sites:?You can choose to move larger sites one section at a time. This can make it easier to monitor, detect, and fix problems faster.

2?? Update your robots.txt files:

• On the old site, remove all?robots.txt?directives. This allows Googlebot to discover all redirects to the new site and update our index. Keep in mind that crawlers will not see the contents of the old robots.txt file once you enabled redirects.
• On the new site, make sure the?robots.txt?file allows all crawling. This includes crawling of images, CSS, JavaScript, and other page assets, apart from the URLs you are certain you do not want to be crawled.

3?? Configure the old website to?redirect users and Googlebot to the new site?based on the URL mapping.

4?? Submit a?Change of Address?in Search Console for the old site. If you're moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS, you don't need to use the?Change of Address?tool.

5?? Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year. This timeframe allows Google to transfer all signals to the new URLs, including recrawling and reassigning links on other sites that point to your old URLs.

From the users' perspective, consider keeping redirects indefinitely. However, redirects are slow for users, so try to update your own links and any high-volume links from other websites to point to the new URLs.

6?? Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. This will help Google learn about the new URLs. At this point, you can remove your old sitemap, since Google will use the new sitemap going forward.

The time it takes Googlebot and our systems to discover and process all URLs in the site move depends on how fast your servers are and how many URLs are involved. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer. The speed at which Googlebot and our systems discover and the process moved URLs depends on the number of URLs and the server speed.

? Update incoming links

Immediately after the site move is started, try to update as many incoming links as possible to improve the user experience and reduce your server load. These include:

• External links: Try to contact the sites in the saved list of sites linking to your current content, asking them to update their links to your new site. Consider prioritizing your efforts by the number of inbound visits for each link.
• Profile links such as from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Ad campaigns to point to the new landing pages.

Monitor traffic

Once you've started the site move, monitor how the user and crawler traffic changes on the new site and also the old site. Ideally, the traffic on the old site will go down, while on the new site, the traffic goes up. You can monitor user and crawler activity on the sites with?Search Console?and other tools.

? Use Search Console to monitor traffic

Many features of Search Console help you monitor a site move, including:

• Sitemaps: Submit the two sitemaps you saved earlier from the mapping. Initially, the sitemap containing the new URLs would have zero pages indexed, while the sitemap of the old URLs would have many pages indexed. Over time the number of pages indexed from the old URLs sitemap would drop to zero with a corresponding increase of indexing of the new URLs.
• Index Coverage report: The graphs would reflect the site move, showing a drop in indexed URL counts on the old site and an increase of indexing on the new site. Check regularly for any unexpected crawl errors.
• Search Queries: As more pages of the new site get indexed and start ranking, the search query reports would start showing the URLs on the new site getting search impressions and clicks.

?Use other tools to monitor traffic

Keep an eye on your server access and error logs. In particular, check for crawling by Googlebot, any URLs that unexpectedly return HTTP error status codes, and normal user traffic.

If you installed any web analytics software on your site, or if your CMS provides analytics, it's also recommended that you review traffic this way so that you can see the progress of traffic from your old to new site. In particular, Google Analytics offers real-time reporting, and this is a handy feature to use during the initial site move phase. You should expect to see traffic drop on the old site and rise on the new site.

Troubleshooting your site move

Here are some common mistakes when migrating a site with URL changes (including HTTP to HTTPS). These mistakes can prevent your new site from being indexed completely.

?? noindex?or robots.txt blocks

Don't forget to remove any?noindex?or robots.txt blocks that were only needed for the migration.

It's fine if you don't have a robots.txt file on your site, but be sure to return a proper 404 quickly if the robots.txt file is requested but not provided.

To test:

• Examine your robots.txt file in your HTTPS site and see if anything needs to be changed.
• Use the?URL inspection tool?for any pages that seem to be missing from Google in the new site.

?? Incorrect redirects

Check your redirects from the old site to the new one. Google frequently sees people directing to the wrong (non-existent) URLs on the new site.

?? Other crawl errors

Examine the?Index Coverage report?for a spike in other errors on your new site during migration events.

?? Insufficient capacity

After a migration, Google will crawl your new site more heavily than usual. This is because your site redirects traffic from the old to the new site, and any crawls of the old site will be redirected to the new site, in addition to any other crawling. Ensure that your site has sufficient capacity to handle the increased traffic from Google.

?? Not updating app links

If you open your web pages within your app, update the app links to the new URLs before you implement your old to new page redirects. Otherwise, Google won't suggest using the app to open the new URLs in search results, but will direct users to the website in the browser instead.

?? Not updating sitemaps

Be sure that your sitemaps are all updated with the new URLs.

?? Not updating Data Highlighter

If you used?Data Highlighter?to map your old pages, you will need to redo your mappings for your new site.

To be continued...

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