Moving your website?

Let’s say you are moving your website to a new domain, how would you do that without affecting your website performance in the Search Engine results.
When you move your site a 404 Error page (File Not Found) will hamper a user’s experience and can negatively impact your site’s performance.

Here are some useful tips on what you need to do:
- You need to move the contents of one directory or sub domain and test the move after which you need to use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This will tell Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

- After this you need to check to see if the pages on your new site appears in the search engine result pages. If you are satisfied it is now safe enough for you to move your entire site. To gain a good user experience a page to page redirect is recommended although time consuming it will give the users a consistent experience.

Now what if your brand has changed or maybe your are looking at a re-design you would first want to move your site and then launch your redesign.

- Both external and internal links need to be thoroughly checked and make sure that all the pages with the in coming links are redirected to your new site.

- Add your new site to your webmaster tools account and then create and submit a sitemap listing all the urls of your new site.

- Lastly verify and keep both your old and new site verified in webmaster Tools and look for crawl errors regularly also make sure that that there are no unwanted 404 errors.