Major Changes to a Website: Why Are You Even Doing It? - Search Engine Journal

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Google’s John Mueller answered a question about how long it takes for Google to process moving from non-www version of a site to a www version of the site. Mueller answered the question but he also addressed the bigger issue of site changes and whether or not they are even necessary.

What’s Best Way to Change Site Without Affecting SEO?

The person asking the question wanted to know how to make a major site change without it impacting their top ranks.

The question:

“My website is on non-www which is ranked number one on Google. Both pages and posts …I want to switch from the non-www version to the WWW version.

What’s the best way to do it without affecting SEO ans is there any risk in… of changing when you do that?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“The best way to do this is to follow the normal site move guidelines that we have. And essentially everything is outlined there.

So with regards to tracking the URLs that you have previously to kind of the following through with the redirect and making sure that all of that is set up properly, I would follow those things.

My feeling is that overall a move within the same domain where you’re just changing essentially a different subdomain is something that is fairly unproblematic and should happen...

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