The Googlebot is a pretty smart cookie; considering all of the information that’s available online, it does a fantastic job of sorting things out and returning relevant results.  That said, it can get thrown off by certain behaviors, and if you intend to move a domain name, there’s a new feature that really deserves a second look.

Think of all the stuff that can go wrong when you move in the real world: broken household items, utilities incorrectly getting turned off or on, important pieces of mail making their way back to the sender.  Not all of these have digital equivalents, but there are definite analogies.

So use the Change of Address feature and stop fretting.  A help page explains the basic idea: “you can use the Change of address tool to tell Google about your new URL.  We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL.  Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL.”

This’ll prevent you from losing traffic, and hopefully whatever reason you have for making a move will then be able to help you get more even faster.

One note: for security reasons, you will need both add and verify your old and new sites through Google Webmaster Tools to take advantage of the Change of Address feature.

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