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Background

My main website (a Global Maritime Employment Portal) was earlier for a long time on a free US server (2001-2007) before I decided to move it to a different server with paid hosting. The basic problem when moving from a free server is that normally you cannot get a "301 redirect". Simply explained: "You get what you pay for".

Every free server gets their income either from Google AdSense advertisements or some other ads and/or banners. Why would they bother to arrange a redirect to send all traffic to an other server and loose all income from that website? This is the story about how I did it in another way and still got back my traffic and rankings in Google within two weeks.

The reason I decided to move was that during the last quarter of 2006 the free server added three banners (1 on top and 2 at the bottom) in addition to Google's banner on everyone of my webpages. This meant 170-180 lines of extra code and about 50 KB including the banners. The download and display time increased for most of my webpages to the double or more. This was my main reason.

Prepare the Move Well

Because the slow season in my sector is every year from about April-May to Aug.-Sept. with the traffic generally increasing from September to March, I decided to change domain in April-May as soon as the traffic increase levelled out.

In December 2006 I started to look around for a new web host. Because the website is a Maritime site I decided to move it to UK as London is still the Maritime Capital of the world. First I chose a handful of promising hosts and sent each one a set of 6 questions - same questions to every one. I sent questions like:

• Do you add banners on pages with low cost hosting ?
  
• If my bandwidth (MB use per month) exceeds the allowance, do I have time to arrange something or will you close down the website immediately ?
  
• Can your Tech Support Team help with putting up an "error document" later, if needed ?
  
• Do you have any limit on number of characters in page file names ?
  
• Do you have any pornographic or other kinds of "bad" websites on your server?
  
• etc.

The question about number of characters I included, because my current host had a limit of 32 characters in the filenames, including the extension (.html). I sent the questions to "Technical Support" at each hosting company. I did it in the morning in the Philippines, which is 8 hours ahead of GMT. The one I chose ( www.purple-paw.com ) answered within one hour, which was 02 o'clock on a Monday morning UK time. The slowest response came after two weeks and redirected me to a general answering service in Hong Kong!

The error document was something I didn't know how to make and where to put it on the server. Often people make a typing error when they search for a certain webpage or, may be they don't remember the correct file name. If they then get a regular "Page cannot be found" note from the server these people are lost as visitors / customers. So I put up a document saying:

"We are sorry but we cannot find exactly what your computer was asking for. You will therefore within 5 seconds be redirected to the site map, where you hopefully find what you are looking for."

If you redirect your visitor to your Home page - as some webmasters do - the visitor doesn't understand what happened. So you tell them they have to look again. As they have to do that, isn't it better to send them to the site map and make them aware of where they are ending up, and why?

Because I knew I would have to get the URLs for my incoming links changed by sending e-mails to each webmaster I started to collect a list of webpages sending me traffic. I started with my website traffic data for December and then continuing every month from then on.

To this I added the e-mail addresses for the webmasters or alternately URL for that website's contact page. I also hade, since late 2001 when I started asking for incoming links, saved the e-mails from each webmaster giving me an incoming link, but I knew a few addresses would have changed in some 5 years. I then combined these data so that I could pick out:

• The oldest working incoming links, and
  
• The links that sent me the most traffic

There were in 2007 several links from 2002 and 2003 still sending traffic. All these I put in an descending order. Simultaneously I started planning how to make some kind of "redirect" to the new location for both search engines and visitors.

Early February I opened a new thread in Google Groups [ Webmaster Help ] with a short description of what I planned to do plus a direct question to Google whether this would work. I even invoked the names of Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, and Adam Lasnik. Of course, I never got any answer from anyone of them. It's not very probable any "Googler" would give that kind of advance endorsement. But no answer at all was much better than a negative answer, isn't that so? I decided to go ahead with my plan.

Google Webmaster Central team has published some advice on how to best move the site from one domain to another. This advice is based on the situation when moving from one paid hosting to another paid hosting. I moved from free hosting to paid hosting and changed domain at the same time.

The new domain name.
My old URL was of the form:
www.example.com/xy/donpedroshipping/
Because I for several years had received visitors who instead of bookmarking one of my pages used a "navigational query", i.e., for instance, "donpedroshipping", I decided to use my old sub-domain as the new domain name:
www.donpedroshipping.co.uk/
I chose the extension ".uk" because I could get a two year domain name registration. No "spammy" websites are ever registered for two years, just for a few months at a time only. Google is a domain name registrar so those data are in Google's data banks. And as Google already before was sending about 60% of the search engine traffic their data and information about my website was important and worth to consider during the move. Google's search engine market share in US is about 65%.

Redirect Without 301 Redirect

I prepared a template with the old background, my logo plus the site menu. Then I only needed on each page to add page title, heading, and a little bit text advising the visitor the webpage has moved. This I did with a "clickable link" to the right webpage at the new location. Then I copied over all the traffic data collectors to the templates, only one of them needed a number inserted on each page before uploading. This was so I would later see which websites continued to send traffic to the old sub-domain.


Screen shot of the old domain "redirect page" (Home page)
Click on picture to get full size version (41 KB).
To get a fuller view I cut the logo in half - on the full screen version you can see the text better. Every link in the site menu is a full URL directly to each page at the new domain. This picture is not included in the "printer friendly" version.

In the template <head> section I included a robots meta tag "noindex,follow", which I knew at least the major search engines should recognize. I had earlier read an article by Matt Cutts about the search engines treating the meta robots tag differently, so I was prepared for some differences. I remember, however, Google and Ask.com was treating that tag as intended.

Google's published PR number for my Home page was PR04 before the move. That shows there were a lot of good incoming links, with Yahoo's site explorer I got a total of over 400, but this included a lot of nonsense websites (advertisements and link farms) that were linking to me. By choosing which incoming links I asked to be changed I got those "bad" ones culled out and started afresh with a very nice collection indeed.

To be sure every search engine would "understand" it was still the same old website at a new location, I left all, except a very few, link texts ("anchors") and descriptions as they were. Only a few were definitely wrong and had to be corrected.

After the site was moved I found a form at Google with which one can report change of server or domain, but by then the site was already re-indexed. May / June 2009 Google re-published the tool but it can be used only when moving from one paid server to another. When moving from a free server to a paid server the technique described here seems to be the only one that works well.

In addition I had the old location in Google's Webmaster Tools as well as in Yahoo's Site Explorer. The website was both verified and authenticated. I also hade a xml sitemap since early 2006, which I had fed both Google and Yahoo!. In January 2007 I changed my site level search to Google's Custom Search as that would have an effect on Google's spider when I later would change my URL in the Custom Search Engine.

The Final Move

The actual move I did during the weekend April 14-15, 2007, because weekends are always the slowest every week. My extremely bad Internet connection and some small mistake I did when uploading my images and page files to the new server - I had a brand new FTP program, caused everything to go to wrong hard disk on the server. As I was very careful when choosing the new server, the support team was very pleasant and moved all my files over to the correct place. Again around 02 o'clock on a Monday morning in UK.

Immediately after I had checked everything was working correctly at the new domain I uploaded the "redirecting" templates on the old server and thus replaced all content with "no content". Next was to feed the xml sitemap, first the old location and then the new location separately, to both Google and Yahoo!. The last xml sitemap at the old location has a modification frequency of "never" for every page.

I already had changed the URL both in Google's Webmaster Tools and Yahoo's Site Explorer at same time as when feeding the new xml sitemap. Now I had to change the URL in my Google's Custom Search engine and straight after I searched for one of my strongest key phrases. This caused the Custom Search to ask Google's spider to check that URL and according to the server logs GoogleBot visited the new domain within 2 hours from the move.

Once this was done I could rest until the next day and let matters have their course. The next day I started my campaign to change the URL in my incoming links. Be prepared changing URLs in incoming links will take much more time than what you imagine in advance.

After one week (8 days) all my webpages at the new location were re-registered in Google's main index (nothing in the supplemental). I also immediately applied for AdSense to my new location, this was approved straight away and in a couple of days that one was included on all pages - only 16 lines of code and no graphics.

So now I had in fact two Google spiders working for me. As an extra bonus all my webpages did download and display in less than half of the time before.

Traffic After the Move

Those websites that before the move sent the most visitors also had the most active webmasters. About the first 20 URL change requests were generally taken care of within one working day. Then when I started with websites sending much smaller number of visitors, the response was much slower and sometimes no response at all. Some of the very oldest links were obviously from websites that since had "died", or may be the webmasters had lost interest in their sites. In this way I lost some incoming links - those are still pointing to the old domain.

May be one answer from a webmaster gives the idea of other "lazy" / careless webmasters: QUOTE: If/when I get the chance I'll make the change. But it's not going to be very high on my priority list, I'm sorry." UNQUOTE. I just wonder, why has that webmaster put up the link originally? For himself or for his visitors? Or, could it be just "to show he's well connected" or what?

After 2 weeks almost all of my webpages had recovered their old rankings in Google ( first search results page ). It took Yahoo's Slurp (spider) 3 weeks to visit first time. AOL and Ask.com visited the new domain about same time and started very soon afterwards sending traffic. It took Yahoo! over 6 weeks before a small trickle (very small!) started showing up. Even MSN - Live search was considerably faster than Yahoo!, although the traffic from MSN doesn't amount to very much, and never has.

Because my pages were well ranking in Google already before the move and didn't loose much of their rankings either, I gained a lot. That's because Google's search engine market share is considerably higher in Europe than in USA. In August 2007 Google had a market share of 88.5 % in Germany and 79.4% in UK, while Yahoo and MSN/Live had only 7.7% and 5.3% respectively in UK. In fact Google supplied 84.4% of the search engine traffic to my site in August - total traffic being 50% more than before the move.

By end of August (after 4 months) I had noticed Yahoo was sending mainly navigational queries to the new domain, while all "content queries" went to the old domain. The change hadn't worked through all Google's data centres either, a (very) few small regional ones still sent some traffic to the old domain, although that was "even less than a trickle".

MSN was still in August completely confused, sending about half of traffic to the old and the other half to the new domain. Most other smaller ones, including AOL and Ask.com had already made a complete changeover. But because of Google's dominant market share in Europe it's really only the websites ranking in Google that matters for that traffic. In July about 35% of visitors to the old location clicked onwards to the new domain, that percentage was increasing in August as the total number continued going down at the old domain.

End of September (after 5 months) the European market shares started showing through for the "three big sisters". In other words, the traffic from outside of Europe dragging Google's share slightly down to about 76% but increasing Yahoo and MSN / Live shares to about 10 and 7 percent respectively. All spiders had also started visiting regularly, i.e. about once per week.

During the last week of October, the week Oct. 22-27, (after 6 months) Google up-dated the published PR-number (in the toolbar). My homepage at the new location showed PR 04 - in other words same as before the move. So in the end I didn't loose anything at all.

In December 2007 Google and Yahoo agreed to recognize a new "robots meta tag": content="noarchive", which has the result of that page dropping out of the cache. As there were still some traffic to the old domain from some "cached" pages - both in Google and Yahoo - I implemented this immediately.

The "final" robots meta tag on the old domain pages got then to be:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow,noarchive"
It's better to have only one "robots meta tag", instead of two or three separate ones.