Things to Know Before Moving Your Website [Infographic]

If you are changing your webhost or moving your website to a different domain or sub – directory, chances are that you may screw up your websites SEO. The following infographic shows the steps that should be taken before moving a website to another domain, web server or directory.

The following chart beautifully suggests some important things:

Create content and get Indexed: Write some content on the newer website and try to get links from other websites, forums. Get the new domain indexed

301 redirects: If you are moving your old content to a new address, always perform a 301 redirect from old URL to the new URL.

Keep the Old Site live for some days: After the 301 redirect, do not delete the older website and wait for some days before the newer one is completely indexed and the traffic balances out.

Update last mod date in Sitemap: This is a good one. You should update the “last modified” date in the older website’s sitemap so that the search bots know when was the last time this website was updates. Also make a list of all current articles in the sitemap of the newer website.

Monitor in Webmaster tools: Add your new website to Bing and Google’s webmaster tools and monitor the crawl errors encountered.

If you are using WordPress as the CMS of your blog, make sure you read the following guides:

1. How to change Blog’s hosting provider
2. How to migrate from WordPress to Blogger
3. How to move core WordPress files to a custom directory.

Thanks Chris