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Moving a Site

Note to self: don't ever move a site this way again. The good news is there were only a few pages to move, the bad news is I did it entirely wrong (or at least the hard way) from a search engine standpoint.

I made what, in retrospect, appears to be a somewhat common mistake of attempting to move a site to a new domain and restructure its pages at the same time. It seemed like an easier way to go at the time, but I wouldn't do it again. Unfortunately, this approach resulted in a messier path in getting search engines to update their indexes. A sequence of events that probably would have worked out better:

  1. Move the pages exactly as they were
  2. Implement a global redirect(s) from the old site to the new site (i.e. keep the paths the same)
  3. Once on the new site for a while and the search engines had adjusted, then restructure with redirects as needed from the old pages to the new ones

One additional advantage of separating the moving and restructuring tasks is that there's no hurry to restructure the whole site. As a result it would have been possible to migrate to the new structure at a more leisurely pace. Instead, I had to make sure all of the critical redirects were set up individually for everything being moved.

Google has a change of address tool to easily move a site from one domain to another which I will definitely take advantage of in the future. However you decide to go in moving a site, be sure to properly set up your 301 redirects for the old pages.

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