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I had a client say to me the other day “Moving his website was as hard as moving House”, so I though I would address the problems involved in order to make this less stressful. I would say at least half of the people who have moved their website to another domain at some point, the main reason being the targeting suffix i.e. .co.uk .fr, was geographically incorrect for their target audience, although this has been partly solved by the geo-targeting feature in webmaster tools. The other reason was to have their keywords in the first phase of the URL, for instance if your primary keyword was “boat”, you would want a url which appeared like this www.boat.co.uk, as Google puts high value on the url matching your keyword. This can also be solved via sub domains, a topic for a different day. Anyway back to the topic in hand. By moving your site your goal is to make the transition without effect to your users and SEO, so here are the steps I would recommend.

1) Always keep you old url and forward it to your new site, so you don’t lose any of your customers and the Page-Rank you have developed for the site always use a 301 permanent redirect. A common mistake by junior developers is to use a 302 tempory redirect, this is a sackable offence if you ask me and does a lot of damage.

2) 301 redirects all the pages of your site to the relevant pages within your new site as this will minimise any loss on direct traffic, don’t just redirect it to your homepage. If this is not possible make it the nearest relevant page.

3) If your new website is a redesign of your old site, I would recommend moving the old site over to the new Url whilst waiting for it to be cached, then erect the new site. This might temporarily effect your ranking but it identifies to Google you’re just moving your domain, not using someone else’s domain to increase your PR.

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