We've just bought a new domain - need advice on the exact procedure to follow...
-
Hi guys,
We've just bought a 3 letter .co.uk domain to replace our current 20 character old domain.
Our existing domain is PR5 with quite a few links (that we can modify no problem) We're currently .301 redirecting the new domain to the old domain.
I was looking at the procedure in one of the guides but as it's slightly different - is this the correct procedure?
1. prep the duplicate site on new domain and prep the individual htaccess .301 redirects
2. Add new the domain to google webmaster tools bing Webmaster centre
2. On the switchover date - modify all possible incoming links from external sites
3. On the switchover date - apply the .301 redirects and make the new site live
4. On the switchover date - apply the new sitemaps to google & bing
5. on the switchover date - fill out the change of address form in webmaster tools
6. Do the happy dance?
many thanks in advance,
Tony.
-
Simply, yes that just about covers it.
The things to bear in mind are that there is often a delay in recognising the new domain so there may be a short amount of time where your domain is not apearing on the SERPS.
My personal advice is as follows:
Pre-move: Buy the new domain as early as possible and put some simple content on it. Submit/register your domain with the major search engines and get a few links to ensure it is listed and the search engines recognise it (this helps to reduce or avoid sandboxing).
1. Create all necessary 301 Redirects.
2. Use analytics and site explorer to find the top 200 or so domains sending traffic to your old domain and contact their webmasters to change the links.
3. Make sure both the old and new sites have been verified and have site maps submitted.
4. Launch your new site with a media and online marketing campaign. The goal is to get as many new inbound links as possible as quickly as possible and to attract a large number of branded searches for the new site.
5. Monitor your Webmaster Central account for 404 errors and to check how Google is dealing with your 301's. Whenever a 404 is produced, place a 301 in place.
6. Monitor the spiders on your new domain. Search engines spend more time crawling sites they trust so when your crawl level is close to your old sites level you are probably close to that trust level (this is a crude measurement).
7. Monitor your search engine traffic referrals to help determine how your new site is developing on the internet.
8. You can also check your server logs for 404 and 500 errors.
For more information Matt Cutts published the following:
http://blog.milestoneinternet.com/web-development/faq-on-duplicate-content-and-moving-your-site-by-matt-cutts-at-pubcon-2009/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Gradual Increase in Domain Authority After Domain Migration But No Improvement in Organic Traffic Yet
We migrated our domain in early April and simultaneously added an SSL certificate. Everything was done by the books. All redirects implemented perfectly, very few errors. Google notified via Search Console. Despite all steps being done perfectly our domain authority dropped from 24 to 8. Organic traffic dropped from about 80 per day to about 10. Each month domain authority increases by 2 or 3. We are now back up to a DA of 16. But no improvement in organic traffic yet. At what point should organic traffic start to return? Hopefully the consistent improvement in DA is a good sign. I have been told that adding SSL and moving the domain at the same time was a very bad idea. We are starting link building next week. Hopefully that will help further. Any ideas as to when this situation will improve? Needless to say it has been awful for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Please Help me! I need advice for my website
I have 2 Domains with the same name vps nine and vpsn ine with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
I Need to put static text every page (600 words) need advice
i need to put static text (about our company brief 600 words) to all content section of pages of our website. I know it's bad for SEO Duplicate Content. But i need to tell google this is my static content and do NOT crawl it. Or something like that. canonical is for whole page but i need to set it up for certain positions of every page. is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nopsts0 -
Need advice on 301 domain redirection
Hello friends, We have two sites namely spiderman-example.com & avengers-example.com which sells the same product listed out under similar categories, since we are about to stop or put down the site “avengers-example.com” because we just want to concentrate in bringing up a single brand called spiderman-example.com. “Spiderman-example” has comparatively more visitors and conversion rates than ''avengers-example'' ie. 90 % more traffic and conversion. Avengers-example has a small fraction of loyal customers who still search for the brand-name & there are a hand-full of potential keywords those ranking on its own. So is it advisable to redirect Avengers-example to spiderman-example using 301-redirect? Will this help to gain any link-juice from Avengers-example? If so how can we effectively redirect between two domain’s with minimal loss in page authority & linkjuice to enhance ''spiderman-example''? Off beat:These names "Avengers" and "Spiderman" were just used as an example but the actual site names has no relation to the ones mentioned above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semvibe0 -
Launching a new site with old, new and updated content: What’s best practice?
Hi all, We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content. We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together. Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content? Cheers, Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Are sites that leave out www from domain at a disadvantage to domains with www in url
I know this has been discussed but was wondering what would be the best approach from an SEO perspective. I quite like the idea of setting up websites with domains without www but always worry that setting up domains without www has a disadvantage because user are use to referring to sites with the www included. Thus one of my fears are that users would link back using www version which will mean even if you do a 301 redirect that some of the link juice would be lost. I know some famous sites have used this convention such as http://searchenginewatch.com/ so think it would be possible but still concerned that for new sites it would be better to rather stick to conventions. What are your opinions about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SABest0