Google’s John Mueller revealed that splitting a website into two or more sites, or merging multiple sites together, could cause months of instability in search results.

This topic came up in a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout, where a site owner was asked about the best way to split a website while moving content from the old site to the new site.

“I want to move some content of a French website to a new one. I’d also like to make a new website multilingual; manually translating the content into multiple languages. What’s your advice to do this as clean as possible?”

Before getting into the technical details of splitting a website, Mueller advised the site owner about the difficulties Google will have with processing the changes.

It’s unrealistic, Mueller says, to expect content from the existing site to maintain its current search rankings when being moved to a new site.

A site owner may have to wait months before search rankings begin to settle down after a change like that, and even then it’s not certain what the final result will be.

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Mueller did not necessarily advise against splitting a site. It can be a good move, in some cases, but patience is required when monitoring search rankings.

You can see the Mueller’s full response in the video below, starting at the 44:07 mark.