Moving Your Site Host or Domain

One of the first thoughts that pops into the head of any SEO when contemplating a site move to another host is, “How will this affect my site in the search engines.” Doing his best to answer this in an SEO-friendly way, Matt Cutts explains how he did it:

Step 1. Find a good web host and sign up for an account.

Step 2: Make a back-up of your site at the new webhost.

Step 3: Change DNS to point to your new web host.

Step 4: Wait for the DNS change to propagate through the net.

Step 5: Once you are sure people or Googlebots are fetching from the new webhost/IP address, you’re done. You can shut down the old site.

He goes in-depth on each of these points, so read the full post if you’re about to make the switch. If you’re moving from domaina.com to domainb.com, however, things can be trickier:

Now let’s talk for a minute about moving from mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later. I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. I’m happy to hear those reports in the comments and I can pass them on to the crawl/indexing team, but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so. If it’s really easy for you to wait a couple months or so, you may want to do that; it’s always easier to ask crawl/index folks to examine newer code than code that will be turned off in a while.

Emphasis mine. And good advice. Though that bit about replacing code is interesting. I recommend a 302 as your best bet because of the same reasons Cutts says Google will be updating the redirect code - it doesn’t work as advertised. With a 302, at least, your old rankings will stay while the new ones get picked up. It harks back to Step 5 of his first list: once Google likes the new site, switch to a 301. But it all could be changing…