Don’t Forget to Tell Google You Moved

January 25, 2012

Virtually everyone who’s had a website for any length of time has moved a link, changed their hosting provider, and at some point probably blown up their entire site structure and started over. Change is good and its important to keep things fresh, but whenever you move you’d better remember to let the post office know.

In this case the post office is Google, and Bing, and Yahoo, and anyone who ever created a bookmark to your site’s page. You may think to yourself, “Hey, Google will just find me again. They’re good at the whole search thing, I don’t need to worry about it.” You’d be right, partially.

Yes, Google will find you again, but they wont know that the new you and the old you are the same you. If that happens all the history and ranking associated with the old you will disappear and you could find yourself back at the bottom of search results mountain. Even worse, if your old site is still running in any capacity and Google thinks you’re trying to mirror the same data on two different sites they can actually penalize you.

What’s a budding web entrepreneur to do? 301 is the magic redirect number you’re looking for. This is a standard code that all search engines use to identify an old address as having permanently moved to a new one. You simply set up a 301 redirect on your old site and make sure it points to your new site and you’re in business.

Happy Redirecting!

The Commative Team