: You will want to do a 301 redirect. Also, get a Google Webmaster Tools account (it's free) so that you can monitor how Google indexes the new url. It can take quite a while for Google

@Holmes151

You will want to do a 301 redirect. Also, get a Google Webmaster Tools account (it's free) so that you can monitor how Google indexes the new url. It can take quite a while for Google to remove the old url from its index without a 301 redirect. If you don't do a 301, everything will eventually get ironed out and search will start bringing up the new url, but by doing a 301, you make things a billion times easier.

In the future, you may want to put a robots.txt in when testing a site on a url in order to prevent the search engine from crawling and indexing it so that you don't run into this problem again. Then, when you move the stuff to the new url, the content will still all be new to Google.

Vote Up Vote Down

Login to post a comment!