How do you move a website keeping Google SEO in mind?

Have you launched a new website or moved to new hosting, and now your site has stopped showing in Google searches?

Follow Google website move guidelines.

First things first: Review the Google site move guidelines, if you have tried all the steps properly Google will notice the site changes and index the site. However there is no guaranteed timeline. Google seems to be indexing the sites within 1 to 3 weeks, depending on various SEO factors. Some of these are your domain authority, page rank and links from other credible sites.

Get your site indexed on Google.

After you have tried everything in Google guidelines and your site still isn’t showing up on searches? Complete the following which can help pickup your site for faster indexing.

• Submit site to other search engines, do not ignore Bing and Yahoo
• Social networking sites – setup profiles if you do not already have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc
• Submit your site to major local directories
• Make sure you are only using a unique domain submit either www or non-www versions. It is recommend that you stick to what’s already indexed.
• Use a domain authority checker tool to compare non-www and www versions of the domain.
• Check error response codes in Google Webmaster Tools – Sometimes you may notice other 4xx client errors. Fix them right away.
• If you have noticed 429 server error manually verify all the links to ensure the site is accessible. Also use a header tester to make sure the server response is OK: 200.
• Avoid slow response- cheap servers that have slow response times or kick out Google crawlers.
• Use the Fetch as Google feature in webmaster tools to see a Google’s view of the page and code. Once fetched click “Submit To Index” and select URL only.
• When you click on URL you can see fetch and render sections to review how Google looks at the page. In the Google  rendering make sure all the links for that page are accessible and not blocked.
• Do a site:domain.com search on Google and other major search engines to find any www vs non-www URLs. As Google treats www and non-www differently. Make sure to use one has more number of quality/important pages indexed
• If your site has been serving through both www and non-www versions use a tool like Open site explorer to compare the domains for various SEO scores. Obviously you want to pick the one with higher domain authority and highest number of social shares.
• You may see old URLs being dropped from Google and new URLs being indexed. Expect that Google may drop URLs from their index way faster than it indexed new URLs based on 301 redirects.
• If you have access to any other sites that are already indexed on Google, add a follow link from that site. Make sure the link is appropriate from that site and in the same industry vertical.
• Ping site to various blog feed sites and search engines.

Hope this article helps you get your site indexed faster on Google. If you are still having issues contact our search engine optimization team for an SEO audit.