Move your Wordpress blog to a new domain in 15 minutes

Due to some trademark issues, I had to move the Viva Veggie blog (where my girlfriend blogs about veggie recipes and places) to a new domain last Friday (thanks to Frank at Openminds for the much appreciated legal advice by the way). I wasn't particularly looking forward to doing so: moving a website to a new domain is just one thing, making sure search results (and Adsense earnings) don't plummet another. I was surprised to find out however how easy it really proved to be (largely thanks to Google's Change of address).

Here's what I did:

• used Yoast's 10-step moving Wordpress tutorial
• made sure all existing URLs were neatly redirected to veglog.be (adding a Redirect 301 http://oldblog.com/ http://newblog.com/ to the .htaccess on the old domain is all it takes).
• claimed the new domain at Google Webmaster Tools
• notified Google veglog.be is replacing the previously claimed vivaveggie.be using the "Change of address" tool. I hadn't heard about that particular feature before (it was launched in June), but it makes it brilliantly easy to make sure your new domain is indexed quickly (some of the new pages were indexed yesterday morning already) without risking duplicate content penalties.
• That's it: 15 minutes!

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