Ok, we all know that if you’re going to move a website or even a single page, you’ll want to make sure you issue a 301 header to tell the search engines that the page has been “moved permanently”. I always equate it to moving to a new office space, but leaving a sign at the old location that says “We’ve moved!” and lists the new address. The 301 header performs exactly the same task as that sign.

However, last month marked our first experience with having to move a site we had previously optimized to a new domain altogether. The client hadn’t been sure which of their two domains was going to be the ‘official’ one, and didn’t decide until after we had already placed them on Google page 1 for their primary target phrase – on what was to become the ‘unofficial’ domain.

I had read other peoples’ stories about temporarily losing placement when doing 301 redirects, but in the back of my mind I thought, “they didn’t do it properly – they missed something or the 301 header wasn’t being issued”. I guess you can blame the ego on my programming background. In any case, I wasn’t expecting any trouble with the ranking.

Lo and behold, soon after setting up the redirects and changing the virtual hosts, the site dropped from page 1 to page 3-5 for the targeted phrases. No need to panic though – I figured things would balance back out soon enough. It took 2-4 weeks to creep back into the first page of results, but we’re pretty much back in place except for one straggler at the top of page #2 (although we’re getting the #1 local result for that phrase, so it’s not as big an issue as it might be).

So that was our experience with 301′ing a whole site. All in all not too bad, but I think the conclusion should be that unless you have direct help from Google (which they will provide for very large scale/well known sites), you can expect your positioning to get rocked a bit for a few weeks.

Tags: 301, redirect, seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 10:04 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.