Transition of new website

[shoenet]

Hi i currently have my website and it is being hosted by an independent hosting company.

I am now developing a new version of the site, and it is with a new host, and I am looking for advice on how to transition my old website into the new one without losing my search engine rankings.

We are a wholesale shoes website and rank very well in our keywords for our industry.

Please help!

Thanks

[edited by: eelixduppy at 3:34 pm (utc) on Dec. 4, 2008]
[edit reason] no URLs, please [/edit]

[zuko105]

Hey Shoenet,
Get the new site up and running on the new hosting site. Test that site with a hosts file hack on your local machine and make sure all the transactions are working and test some more. Then test again. (catch my drift?).

Make sure all of the urls that work on your old site now work on your new site. Assuming you didn't change url structure, then you won't need to 301 redirect anything over to the new urls. If you did change url structure or aren't carrying all pages over to the new site, please make sure you 301 redirect all of the old pages to their appropriate spots.

Test again :).

Then and only then, change DNS and you're done!

Good luck!

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], shoenet!

this is (google's) matt cutts' blog post on the subject with all the details: [mattcutts.com...]

[shoenet]

thanks so much for your help, any other ideaS?