Website Migration - Very Technical Google "Index" Question

[reidsteven75]

This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specifc:

1. Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory")
2. Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page
3. Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched.  These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords.
4. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory"
5. These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm

The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" connects to the "page directory".  I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls.   Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website?

For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache?

The reason I ask is I am starting to work with a client who has a newly developed website.  The old website domain and files were located on a GoDaddy account.  The new websites files have completely changed location and are now hosted on a separate GoDaddy account, but the domain has remained in the same account.  The client has setup domain forwarding/masking to access the files on the separate account.  From what I've researched domain masking and SEO don't get along very well.  Not only can you not link to specific pages, but if my above assumption is true wouldn't Google have a hard time crawling and storing each page in the cache?

[reidsteven75]

Thanks for the response, I'll be sure to change my clients configuration.

Do you know the specifics of why it's a disaster?  I think it has something to do with the technical explanation above, but I wanted to get some confirmation so I can educate my client as to why it's a disaster.

[ThompsonPaul]

You're correct, Steve - the forwarding/masking is a disaster for SEO and usability.

The domain name needs to point to the new account by changing the A Record in the domain name's DNS file. It's been too long since I've used GoDaddy at all to advise on the setup, but this is standard stuff.

Essentially you declare the new account as the correct one for the website, then the A Record is pointed to that new account and the site will behave as normal with the new content. GoDaddy's support should be able to walk you through the process.

Hope that helps?

Paul