TKG SEO Blog

There are 3 issues to monitor when migrating a site from one domain to another: your website’s index, your links and the redirects from the old site to the new. To help monitor these, we are leveraging Google’s Webmaster Tools.

When I first heard that Geoff wanted to switch over to an entirely new domain name, I suggested we use Google’s Webmaster Tools as a resource to help us in the migration. Recently Google posted an entry on the Webmaster Central Blog entitled “Best Practices When Moving Your Site“.

One piece of the advice we found helpful was to keep both sites in Google’s Webmaster Tools to make sure that our 301 redirects were being crawled properly. This is a really nice feature to have. We are spot checking the site for problems but with the crawlers help, it will be a lot easier to spot these potential problems. The other advice we took was to upload a new sitemap. We are going to watch the sitemap to see which files get crawled first and observe the time it will take for the site to get indexed as good as before (about 435 pages). There are some key metrics we are watching throughout this transition with Google’s Webmaster Tools. Here are the things we are watching:

1. Our links - Will any external links “transfer over” and will our sitelinks stay the same
2. Index - see how fast our site will be indexed again
3. Search Engine Rankings - How will this affect our rankings

So, do you think we are crazy for doing this? The Karcher Group domain had a lot of years under it’s belt along with all those links coming in. We are excited to have the new domain though and will post more details of this transition soon, so check back!