Copyright © 2006-2013 Quantoa LLC.
All rights reserved.
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:
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.
Copyright © 2006-2013 Quantoa LLC.
All rights reserved.