Mac SEO Blog

After switching from MobileMe to a real web hosting service many users are finding that their web.me.com website is still appearing in Google, and often higher than their new website.

This happens because your web.me.com website has been around longer and your new website has the exact same content. Google is not likely to show two websites with the exact same content so you need to make sure you do this as quickly as possible once you move to a real web hosting service.

1) The first thing you are going to want to do is create an XML Sitemap for your new website. You can do this very easily with Sitemap Automator. Follow the instructions for publishing and verifying your website with Google Webmaster Tools (Hint: We have video tutorials on the above page that explains how to do this step by step.)

2) Delete the content from your web.me.com website. You can do this by mounting your iDisk in the Finder (or longing in to your iDisk at http://www.me.com) and going to the Web/Sites/ directory. Delete the contents in this directory.

2a) Advanced: Instead of deleting your content in step 2, you can also use a meta refresh with a refresh rate of 0 to redirect traffic from your web.me.com website to your new website. If you have set up your new website with our Web Hosting services we can help you with this. Otherwise you will need to contact your web hosting company.

3) The changes will not be reflected immediately. If you did step 2 above and you do a search for your website the web.me.com address will still appear in search results for about a week but will go to a non-existing page. If you did step 2a above your web.me.com page will still appear in search engines but will redirect to your new website. Eventually your new site will start to rank higher than your web.me.com page and your web.me.com page will be removed from Google’s search results.

4) Bonus: If you want to completely remove your web.me.com website from Google and other search engines as quickly as possible you need to create a robots.txt files that disallows search engines from indexing your website. To do this create a plain text file called robots.txt and enter the following code exactly as shown below in it;


User-agent: *
Disallow: /


Then put this robots.txt file on your iDisk in the Web/Sites/ directory. Again, if you are using our web hosting services we can do this for you. Otherwise you will need to contact your current web hosting provider.

That’s it for moving your iWeb website from MobileMe to a real web hosting service. Don’t worry, even though Apple has discontinued MobileMe, iWeb will continue to work for a long time as long as you have it installed on your computer. If you are looking to optimize your iWeb site for Google and other search engines, take a look at our iWeb search engine optimization training courses.