Moving your site, how Google handled mine
Its been about two weeks since I moved across from the .com version of my site across to the .co.uk version.
I did what most of us would do and 301′d the site across, some tweaking needed but fairly basic stuff.
I know whenever you do a full site 301 there are a few days when watching Google work it through can be a stressful experience but they are doing a good job so far.
Time yet for a major fekk up but so far so good…
Have you had any problems doing something similar?
Moves can go wrong… 
Tags: Experiments, Google, personal blog, SEO, Wordpress
October 26th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
My 301 redirect almost killed me. We took every precaution, consulted with an eternal SEO consultant just to make sure. We read and researched. Our site has several million pages- so it is not customary, and much of the literature on 301 redirect; ie: how long Google takes to re-index the new domain is based on small and medium sites. In short, the redirect was a disaster, with google delisting the old domain almost immediately, and then very slowly indexing the new domain, tens of thousands of pages at a time. That may seem fast, but we had millions in the index. At that pace, it was going to take us two years to get anywhere close to the pages we had back.
In short, I will never do a 301 again on a large site.
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 am
I havent tried it on something of quite that scale, have done many thousands of pages and mostly Google has been well behaved.
There are no guarantees though and they do at times make a real illogical hash of the process. Not much you can do but start the process and hope..
Crap advice I know but blame Google for being crap…
On a site with that size its perhaps better to do it in sections and concentrate on the 5% of the content that actually makes a difference I suppose…