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Every once in a while you come across a situation in which you must move your company's website to a new domain name. But if you move the site to a new domain name, you have to ensure that the search engines can find the new location, and that you hit as few ranking/traffic dips as possible. Why You May Need a New Domain Name The reasons for your new domain name can vary, ranging from the need to correct file names to create SEO friendly URLs to the need to establish your online identity as a part of your re-branding efforts. Here are a few examples of situations we've come across: You manage a hotel that was once part of a chain (Best Western, Marriott, etc.). But now, you're no longer a part of that chain becoming an independent property. If you old domain was something like city-best-western.com or city-bw.com, then you may feel the need to change the domain name. This is especially the case if you've walked away from the chain to pursue a new strategy that involves re-branding yourself. There have been a few cases where we've had to redirect sites due to the purchase or merging of companies. Once the parent company has established its ownership, it's time to bring the online presence into the fold. We work with a lot of small businesses that have recently moved from a home-made or dated website to something a little more professional. Often times this means they moved to WordPress (or would like to so as to start blogging) or another CMS that creates pages with file names that are not similar to those of the old site. Whatever the reason may be (as long as you're not jumping to a new domain name for SEO reasons) you'll need to take a few steps to make the redirect go as smoothly as possible. Gather Website Information First things first, we need to make sure we completely understand the site(s) in question. It helps to create a spreadsheet containing information on all of the pages of the site with at least: - The navigation title of each page
- The URL to each page
- The content of the pages
- The meta information on each page
Depending on the scope of your redirect, you may need to note additional or less information. It's also a good idea to notate the structure of the site, understanding the hierarchy of pages and sub pages. If you've got a particularly large site, then doing this by hand will be a pain. Instead, you can use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool to get an exportable list of most of that information. While you're taking notes, log into your traffic analyzer of choice and try to familiarize yourself with the amount of traffic your site receives, where it comes from and where it goes to. This one step will serve several purposes: - After the redirect is complete, you'll want to know if your traffic is moving up or down, and you'll want to notice as quickly as possible
- Understanding what pages of your site get the most traffic, and from where will help you plan your redirects appropriately.
- After all this is done, you'll want to update as many inbound links to your site as you can, and the best links are the ones that drive traffic to your site.
- If you've been tracking any rankings progress get an updated report for that as well. This way you can keep an eye out for any sudden drops.
Planning Once you've gathered as much information as you can (it's never too much), then it's time to start planning your redirects. If you're simply moving your site from one domain to another, then your planning will be minimal, but if you're doing this to a site or sites with pages that number in the hundreds or thousands, then get your pencil (mouse) and paper pad (spreadsheet application) ready. If you're acquiring a site as a part of a purchase then you're probably going to redirecting the old site to only certain portions of the parent website. If you're updating your site as a part of a redesign, you'll want to map out the old structure and new structure of your site. The Redirect To learn a little more about the types of redirects you can check out a previous post on the subject. Suffice to say, the grand majority of your redirects are going to be of the 301 type. This basically tells Google and other search engines that the site has permanently moved to a new location and redirect visitors to the new site quickly. Depending on the size of your site, you may want to move sections of your site at a time to make sure everything is working properly. We don't run into situations where this must be done, normally being reserved for sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. When you're moving a website from one domain to another, you don't want to simply redirect the whole website to the new domain name; rather redirect the pages to pages with similar content. This will help to minimize ranking/traffic dips as well as provide a smooth transition for your visitors. Make sure you are constantly testing your redirects. If it's a small site, you can easily check each page. If it's larger, you can use the Screaming Fog tool again. It's a good idea to manually check at least a few pages from each level of the site (including sub folders, categories, etc.). Check for any broken links or 404 errors. After The Redirect Once your redirects are in place and you've ensure that they are working properly, it's time to keep a vigilant eye on the site's health. Make sure you have all the proper tracking and reporting tools setup, and check your site's performance daily for a few days. It's also a good idea to make sure both of the domains are setup in Google Webmaster Tools, with submitted sitemaps. This will help you catch crawl errors that Google may experience. You can also run the Screaming Frog tool to make sure you don't have any broken links. As for the search engine results pages, 301 redirects can take effect within a day, or over the period of a few weeks. Again, this depends on the size of the sites and the and how the old and new site currently rank, etc. It's important to know that redirects only transfer a portion of the link value through them. So, even if you minimize ranking losses as best as you can and implement your 301 redirects flawlessly, you may still see a few dips in rankings. Give it a few weeks to make sure you haven't seen any problems, then begin pursuing as many of the best websites that link to you that you can. You'll want to have them update their link to reflect the new domain name or page. If this redirect was part of a business merger/acquisition, then surely there are press opportunities. If there are, then it would be a good idea to include links to the new site if applicable.
Josh Garner is the owner of SEO Factor, an SEO company with a primary focus on servicing small businesses; providing a range of services including custom SEO solutions and consulting. Josh's SEO experience spans back to 2005 having since worked with companies large and small, helping them to increase their website's rankings and traffic.
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