Google has released a new guide on how to handle moving your site in a way that’s “Googlebot-friendly”.

“Few topics confuse and scare webmasters more than site moves,” say Google Webmaster Trends analysts Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahaji.

As they explain, there are site moves with and without URL changes, which have different guidelines, of course.

“We’ve seen cases where webmasters implemented site moves incorrectly, or missed out steps that would have greatly increased the chances of the site move completing successfully,” they say. ” To help webmasters design and implement site moves correctly, we’ve updated the site move guidelines in our Help Center. In parallel, we continue to improve our crawling and indexing systems to detect and handle site moves if you follow our guidelines.”

They also have a new page on smartphone recommendations, which you should definitely pay attention to. Google announced earlier this week that it is now calling out websites with faulty redirects in mobile search results to save users from having to deal with tapping a search result, which redirects them to a site’s homepage.

Image via Google