Attention .yu domain users: Three simple steps to have your site online even after domain transfer
ICANN which oversees a number of Internet-related tasks, has resolved that .yu TLD assigned to Yugoslavia will operate temporarily under the Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names, operators of the new .rs domain registry, during transition until its eventual abolition on or before 30 September 2009. This allows a two-year transition period for existing .yu names to be transferred either to .me (which is to be delegated to the Government of Montenegro) or to .rs (for Serbian domains).
Then any content you are hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. In order to have your site live, Google has given some recommendations to make sure that your site content is indexed by them.
1. Retain back-links:
While transferring your site from .yu to .me or .rs domains, all links pointing to .yu will be dead. In order to save your site’s back-links, contact webmasters of sites linking to you and ask them to update their links to your new sites. Signup with Google webmaster tools and check the links to your site to get the list of sites linking to you.
2. Prevent broken links:
When you are moving the site content from the old to new site, check your internal links and update those links to reflect changes to prevent broken links.
3. Move the site to a new domain in advance
Don’t delay the process of transferring the site to a new domain. It is better to move a single directory or sub-domain and test the results before moving the site completely. Remember that 301 direction on your old domain will not work after September 30. An additional tip from Google is that during site transfer you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a site map through Google webmaster tools.
Tags: back links, broken links, domain name, domain transfer, Google webmaster