In John Mueller’s Google Search Central Office Hours hangout on 09/03/2021, one webmaster was concerned about the approach of moving articles for a site migration.
They were wondering if there is a difference between moving all articles at once or moving articles in different stages (where stage one is 50 articles, stage two could be the next 50, and so on).
John explained that both approaches would be valid approaches and that there is no difference between either approach.
However, he does make the point that he thinks it makes the most sense to move all articles at once if you can.
It does get challenging with a website merger, where the all-at-once advice doesn’t really apply. Doing things incrementally during a site merge is the more recommended approach, whereas when you’re doing a migration, doing things all at once is preferred.
This conversation occurs at approximately the 3:15 mark in the video.
John Mueller 09/03/2021 Hangout Transcript
Yeah. Hi, I have a question regarding website migration. And currently, we are running a blog and larger websites, both are running on separate domains. And we want to move the blog to the bigger website. But since we don’t want to change many things at once and risk our rankings, we would first adjust the current blog section and here as structure on the website, and then integrate all the articles from the blog domain to the new website. So is it better for the rankings to move all the blog content at once to the new domain? After all the changes are done? Or should we maybe move only a few articles once a month? Because my thought is that with the second approach, we won’t really see a big impact on the relaunch. And yeah, so what’s a better approach?
John 4:12
I think they can both be reasonable approaches. So it’s not something where I would say you need to do it one way or the other. In general, when it comes to website migrations, when you’re moving from one domain to another, I think it makes sense to do it all at once if you can. But when you’re kind of merging or splitting websites, then that’s where the all-at-once advice I don’t think really applies. So especially when you’re merging things together, when you’re combining different websites, then doing that incrementally is perfectly fine. Doing that all at once is perfectly fine. There is no penalty if you move too fast. It’s really more a matter of how you can organize this on your side and how you can kind of handle that migration.
Webmaster 3 5:08
Okay, thank you.
John 5:10
Cool. Yeah, good luck. I think the merging and splitting of websites—it’s always a bit tricky because it’s hard to guess what the final outcome will be. But yeah, good luck. Good luck. I hope it goes well.
Webmaster 3 5:22
Thanks.