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Moving your site, how Google handled mine
October 17th, 2008Its 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… 
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About SEOidiot
Hi my name is Paul Madden and I am a UK SEO based in Lancashire, for years I have been cursed by the nickname SEOidiot which started life as a form of abuse from someone but you need to decide for yourself how accurate the term is.
Quotes about me
"Paul Madden is one of very few UK SEOs who actually practices what
they preach. Most "full service" agencies promise the world and
deliver nothing, others deliver the world and also deliver penalties
and blacklistings after 3 months. I would happily trust a project of
mine with Paul, knowing that he would deliver results without the
nasty surprise at the end"
Rob Kerry
Corporate SEO and director at Ayima
Rob Kerry
Corporate SEO and director at Ayima
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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.
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…