In the latest Google Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller, Gary Illyes, Lizzi Harvey and Cherry Prommawin got together to speak about the launch and migration of the new Google Search Central site. The team migrated four different sites into one central location.
They spoke about how the idea came about, how Lizzi recruited Cherry to join the efforts and how Gary did a lot of the coding to make it happen. The conversation sounds similar to how most people describe their migrations efforts. It is a great podcast to listen to.
Lizzi and Cherry also spoke about naming the new GoogleBot and the spider and why it does not have a name. They kind of blamed legal for it not having a name yet.
John spoke about renaming it from Google Webmasters Central to Google Search Central.
John also spoke about the SEO efforts they made on this migration. They asked the Google SEO team to do the SEO for the site, as opposed to John and his team doing the SEO to make it more fair. He spoke about how the SEO team did a lot of normal SEO stuff for migrations but they also did some keyword research and how that helped them think of new terms to use in their content.
Lizzi also spoke how they decided to time everything. Such as what came first, what came next, and so forth. She explained some of the mistakes involved in this as well.
Here is the podcast:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
