The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about best practices to follow when moving your site from one domain to another without losing your Google rankings. Here are the main points:

• Test your processes by moving only one directory or subdomain first. Check to see whether those pages are appearing in Google’s search results before moving your entire site.
• Don’t just redirect all pages from your old site to the home page of your new site. Try to redirect all pages on your old site to a relevant page on your new site.
• If you’re thinking about changing your domain and redesigning your site at the same time, consider doing these things separately to minimize the risk of error.
• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site (which can be done using Google Webmaster Tools) and try asking webmasters to change any links pointing to your site to use the new domain.
• Don’t allow your old domain to expire until at least 180 days have passed.
• Add your new site to Google Webmaster Tools, verify you own it and submit an XML sitemap containing all the URLs. Keep your old site too so that you can keep an eye out for any errors.

You might also be interested in reading New Design and Move to Blogoscoped.com

Google Website Optimizer (which was originally launched as a closed beta test in October 2006) has finally dropped its “Beta” label and been made available as a standalone product, Google announced yesterday.

Previously only available as a feature within Google AdWords, anyone can now use it on its own “to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent.”

The Website Optimizer Blog Team have also launched The Official Google Website Optimizer Blog to accompany the product.

Also announced by the Google Analytics Blog is that Urchin has graduated out of beta too. Urchin is similar to Google Analytics – it allows you to report on your website traffic – except it needs to be hosted on your own servers rather than Google’s.

[Thanks Mbegin!]