In one of Google’s Office Hour Hangout meetings, John Mueller encountered the good old question of how Google responds to a site move. A meeting participant raised the question, particularly about the “Sandbox Effect” on moving off a site. Let’s see what the details are from the meeting.
Contents
What is a Site Move?
So, A site move is simply moving URLs of your pages or changing the infrastructure of the pages or site.
What is the “Sandbox Effect”?
It is a false notion from the 2000s that Google will keep it from ranking until they trust a site and put it in a “Sandbox.”
Although Google denied the existence of the effect, the notion still exists among site owners.
Best Way To Move Your Site
Alongside the “Sandbox Effect” question, the person asked about the best way to move a site, in small sections or all in one.
The Question Was:
“What is the best course of action to take when you need to 301 redirect all URLs to a new set of URLs?
The number of pages will exceed one million.
And you want to minimize the sandbox effect; if there is a sandbox effect, how long could it be?
Would we lose positions that we may not recover?
We planned to do a one-to-one redirect and had requested batch redirects, but it’s not possible, so pages, images, URLs, etc., should be turned upside down at the same time.”
Mueller’s Response To The “Sandbox Effect”:
Mueller established that the Sandbox effect for site move is not real. It is a generalized misconception.
John said:
“To me, this sounds like a traditional site shift situation. You move from one domain to another and redirect all URLs from your old site to a new one, and we have to take care of that.
And at least, from my point of view, there’s nothing like a sandbox effect.
There is absolutely nothing defined as a sandbox effect on our side when moving a site. “
All at Once?
In their Google Support Website, Google advised moving a site in step by initially moving a small part for testing.
In Office Hour, John Mueller said otherwise. John said it is better to move a site all at once.
His answer was:
“So if you need to make a site move, perform a site move and redirect all your pages.
Often the simplest approach is to redirect all pages at once. Our systems are a bit tuned to this too.
To try to recognize it “.
Google’s Approach To A Site Move
For this question, Mueller explained that the Google system doesn’t slow down the moving process for a site, instead speeds it up.
He responded:
“So when we see a website starting to redirect all pages to another website, we will try to reprocess it faster so that we can process the site’s movement as quickly as possible.
And we will never say, oh, they are migrating the site so that we will slow down.
On the contrary, when we realize that a site moves, we try to process things faster. “
Summarizing Up:
From Mueller’s response to questions, it is clear that Google System recognizes the site’s movement and speeds up the process, which makes sense that doing so can help Google continue with direct sites to pages useful for the users.