As I posted a few weeks back, I am moving from a sub domain on a dot com site to a local TLD in Germany. So far the process has been moving slowly. Google still shows over 6M pages indexed on the sub domain and only 200k pages index on the .de domain. However with this crawl cycle rate tool in the Google Webmaster Tools I have bumped it up to Fast. Hopefully this will move the process along at a faster rate.

The other funny thing is that only 1/3rd the traffic from the .com sub domain is coming to the new .de domain. But almost all of the traffic has dropped of the sub domain. But I have high hopes based upon the small representation in the index.

Last week I posted that I am moving one site to another from a de.site.com to a site.de domain. Looks like after a few technical issues the new site is being indexed and is getting some traffic. The other site after one week is still getting most of the traffic from Google.

The Google Webmaster Tools site is showing that it is growing. Still keeping my fingers crossed.

I am sure someone has gone through this nightmare before. I have just moved a huge site from Germany, which was hosted on a .com sub domain with a US IP address.

Here are the factors that make this dangerous.

1). Millions of pages
2). .com to .de domain name

Based on recommendations from the experts at Google I am redirecting each and every URL to be an exact match on the new domain. For example de.mysite.com/cool-page.html 301 to www.newsite.de/cool-page.html.

Technically all of the links should just pass over, but the real question is! Will this new domain have the site is too big problem? Or will it just rank since I am 301’ing every single page to the new site separately.

The site contains most of the same content, however is on a completely new code based. New look and feel and some additional navigation to it.

Further updates to come!