How to move a single page of content to a new domain

Question

I am trying to figure out best-practise for moving a single page of content from one domain to another in a way that will preserve search engine ranking. I have found plenty of instructions for wholesale domain moves, but this situation is slightly different.

I have a blog, one page of which gets a lot of search traffic for a specific term. I would like to take that one page of content and move it to an entirely new domain, which I will then use to start adding new content to.

My plan so far:

• register the new domain
• remove the single page of content from the old domain
• put up the single page of content on the new domain
• set up a 301 redirect for the URL of the page on the old domain, pointing to the new domain

Is this the right way to do it? Is there anything else I need to do in order to keep Google happy?

Answer 1

Yes, that's a good start. To add to your steps:

• Check to make sure that you don't have any internal links to the old page in your content or sitemap, and if so change them to the new URL.
  
  
• Check for external links in Google Webmaster Tools, and if possible, try to contact the webmaster of the referring site to change them to the new URL.
  
  
• To avoid any potential for duplicate content issues, in case it appears elsewhere, you might add a Canonical link to the page.
  
  
• Submit your updated sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, and other search engines.
  
  
• Use the "Fetch As Google" function in Google Webmaster Tools so that Google will re-crawl and index your site. See this for more information on that: Ask Google to crawl a page or site