There are quite a few reasons for wanting to change the URL of your website or webpage, and the best way to go about it is to 301 redirect it. Nevertheless, redirecting a webpage is the same as redirecting a website with more than 1,000 pages. Another problem is that the three chief search engines do not always re-index pages with the same efficiency and speed.
The key to the problem is to getting it right from the start. When moving a website the old URL should still work, but instead of serving content it should return a 301 Moved Permanently pointing at the new URL.
Avoiding canonicalisation
Canonicalisation is basically the duplication of content, which occurs when a website can be accessed, for example, via both www.mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com. Although a lot of has been written about dire penalties for duplicate content – especially from Google – the main disadvantage lies in the fact that search engine robots will choose the site or page that they deem most relevant, often mistakenly. However, apart from the fact that duplicate content does not look professional, canonicalisation produces a much more damaging side effect. Since in-links are spread over both sites and not all the pages are actually indexed together, this can reduce page rank. The solution lies in getting 301 redirects right from the start for all the major search engines.
Checklist
There are many things that you can do to help the process along:
1. Identify the most visited parts of your site and emphasise them by overhauling the internal link structure. If high-content or profitable parts of the site are quite a few clicks away from you home page, increase their prominence in the site’s navigational scheme, as well as introducing more cross-links.
2. Block the indexing of low-content pages so that search engine spiders re-index the most important parts of the site first.
3. If yours is a large site, and you are concerned about losing page rank, try redirecting it a bit at a time to see how quickly and efficiently search engines re-index it.
4. Choose the best time to redirect. Even though yours is not a seasonal site, there is usually a time during the year when it receives less traffic.
5. Change all your site’s directory listing and inform all your link exchange partners.
6. Consider submitting a press release.
