We often receive questions when an affiliate undergoes a major website upgrade, changes content management systems, or both. We created this checklist to share with you four steps to take to ensure your redesign is successful.

1. Keep the file name and directly structure the same, if possible. If it isn’t possible, use 301 redirects to send visitors to the appropriate new pages. For more on 301 redirects, read tips from Bing and Google. Notify other websites that link to you of the changes.
2. Register for the commercial search engines’ webmaster tools.
   + Bing Webmaster Tools
   + Google Webmaster Central
3. Update the sitemap on your website and notify the search engines via the webmaster tools.
4. Notify the search engines of the content that has been removed via the webmaster tools.

If you’ve undergone a redesign, followed these four steps, and you still don’t see your content updated in your site search results, please notify us at USASearch@gsa.gov.

Additional Resources

• How to move your content to a new location, Google Webmaster Central Blog