It IS Possible To Change Your Domain Without Losing Your SEO Juice. Here's How.

It IS Possible To Change Your Domain Without Losing Your SEO Juice. Here's How.

• While it can be a scary prospect, sometimes it’s necessary to move your site to a new domain. Often it comes down to maintaining consistent branding; for instance, changing your domain to match your company’s new name.
• While transferring your site to a new domain isn’t something you should do on a whim, it is possible to do it without suffering permanent damage to your search rankings.

        Be aware that you are likely to experience a short-term drop in                rankings immediately  following your move.

• However, by following the steps below you should see your rankings rebound to pre-move levels, often within a few months.

       Why Change Domains?

Before we look at the process of changing domains, it’s helpful to look at why website owners typically decide to make this change. As already mentioned, it isn’t a move you should take lightly, however there are some solid reasons why it may be beneficial for your site and business:
A more user-friendly domain name has become available: If you’ve been stuck with a .net or .biz domain and suddenly a .com becomes available, you may want to consider grabbing it and moving your site to the new domain. While it’s certainly not necessary to do so, .com domains can be easier for your customers to remember, and may convey a greater level of credibility than, for instance, a .biz domain.

• Your business name has changed and you want your domain to reflect this: There isn’t really any way around this one. If your business name has changed, you’ll want to change your domain to maintain consistent branding.
• You want to consolidate multiple similar domains into one: If you have several sites that are essentially delivering the same types of content to a similar audience, you may want to consider amalgamating your domains. Dr. Pete over at Moz recently attempted this to bring his five personal and professional sites under one roof. If this is something you’re considering, I’d encourage you to read through his SEO case study before you start.
• You’re just plain tired of your domain: If your domain accurately reflects your brand and you’ve simply gotten bored with it, consider carefully whether changing over to a new domain is worth the work and risk of temporarily losing your rankings. Changing your domain isn’t something you want to do more than once, so it’s important to be absolutely certain before making the change.
• If you are committed to changing your domain, the rest of this post will walk you through exactly what you need to do to move your site while maintaining your SEO juice.
• I wrote this post as I recently purchased Make Some Time from Aniket Tapre fromVodlo. Our goal all along was to transfer the site to Due. In this post I will walk you through everything I did in order to have the transition of the site go smoothly.

Here it goes!

1. Back Up Your Site – Totally & Completely

• Imagine starting the migration to a new domain, running into trouble, and finding your backup is corrupted or incomplete. Unfortunately, this happens all too often.
• Before attempting any major changes (including messing with your .htaccess file), make sure you have a complete, working backup of your files and database. If you have a WordPress site, you can use a plugin like BackUpWordPress or  Backup Buddy to back up your site and help you migrate to the new domain.

 2. Clean Up Your New Domain

3. Move Content to the New Domain

• Many SEO experts recommend moving only a portion of your site – for instance, a subdomain – so you can test how the change will impact your search rankings. Unfortunately, this process can take a fair bit of time, and many site owners want to make the move as quickly as possible.
• If you can spare the time, this process will give you a way to test out your process from start to finish without jeopardizing the rankings of your site as a whole. After moving the content to the new domain, be sure to 301 redirect those pages from the old domain to the new one in order to ensure Google knows where to find your new content.
• If you’re going to be manually transferring your content to the new domain (as opposed to using a plugin), you’ll need to make sure you first have your content management system in place. For instance, if you’re using WordPress on the new domain, you’ll need to make sure the basic framework of your site is in place by  installing WordPress on the new domain.
• If you’re moving from a WordPress site to another WordPress site, you can use a plugin like  Duplicator or  All-in-One WP Migration to automate the entire process.

4. Permanently Redirect Old Pages

Don’t risk losing visitors and SEO juice to dead ends. Photo courtesy of Hootsuite.

• To make sure Google and your visitors are sent to the new domain, you’ll need to set up server-side 301 redirects in your .htaccess file. This small piece of code indicates that you have made a permanent move to the new domain and that all traffic – direct and search – should be forwarded to the new URLs.
• The importance of this step cannot be overstated. Properly setting up 301 redirects is the key to maintaining your search rankings. 
• Without this critical step, you’ll essentially be hosting two identical sites, and setting yourself up for major duplicate content penalties.
• If you’ll be changing up your content on the new domain (meaning your new site doesn’t have the exact content as your old one), you’ll have a few additional steps:

• Create 404 pages for content that has no equivalent on the new domain.
•   Map your old URLs to your new URLs before attempting any redirects. This will help keep you organized as you attempt to redirect Google and your visitors to the most relevant content on your new domain.
• Here are some great tools and articles for setting up 301 redirects:

The .htaccess generator: A free tool that will give you the exact code you need to input into your .htaccess file.

• Changing page URLs with 301 redirects: From Google Webmaster Tool’s help section.

Simple 301 Redirects: A free WordPress plugin for automating redirects.

5. Officially Tell Google You’ve Moved

• While your redirects will signal to the search engines that your content has moved, it’s still a good idea to submit an official change of address notification. To do this, you’ll first need to add and verify your new domain in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Once your new domain is verified, login to your Google Webmaster search console and click on the gear icon at the top right of the screen. You should see the Change of Address tool in the drop down menu. The process is quite self-explanatory, as you can see in the screenshot above. Just remember that you must have all your 301′s in place before Google will accept your change of address request.

6. Create a Sitemap

A sample XML sitemap generated by the Google XML Sitemaps plugin

• At this point, it’s time to leave your old domain behind and focus exclusively on your new one. While an html sitemap is always great for improving user experience, I’m referring here to an XML sitemap for the benefit of the search engines.
• Google actually recommends creating two sitemaps: one with your old URLs (from your old domain) and one with all your updated URLS (from your new domain). Once you’ve submitted both sitemaps, the process should go like this, according to Google: “Initially, the sitemap containing the new URLs would have zero pages indexed, while the sitemap of the old URLs would have many pages indexed. Over time the number of pages indexed from the old URLs sitemap would drop to zero with a corresponding increase of indexing of the new URLs.”
• Creating an XML sitemap manually is virtually impossible, especially for larger sites with thousands of pages. Fortunately there are some great tools that completely automate the process:
  XML-Sitemaps: Crawls your entire site and then automatically generates a sitemap. Also provides a list of broken links which will be useful in step #7.
  Google XML Sitemaps: A free plugin that not only creates a sitemap, but notifies the search engines whenever new content is added.

7. Check & Update Internal & Inbound Links

Screaming Frog’s Broken Link Checker can help you easily find and replace broken links

• This can be a tedious process, but one that’s made much more manageable using a tool likeScreaming Frog’s Broken Link Checker. Keep in mind that while your 301 redirects will ensure even internal links go to your new domain, eventually you’ll want to shut down your old domain; and at that point all your internal links to your old domain would break. For this reason, you’ll want to find and replace all your internal links to point them to the new domain.
• It’s also advisable to contact sites linking to yours and asking them to update their links to your new site. Again, while these links will eventually find their way to your new site, requesting the change will ensure you keep that link authority indefinitely – even once you shut down your old domain.

8. Watch Your Analytics, Especially in the Beginning

Congratulations! At this point you have successfully moved your site to your new domain. If you’ve followed the seven steps above, you shouldn’t see a permanent decline in your search traffic.

However, it’s always a great idea to carefully monitor your site analytics and Google Webmaster console in the months following your move. If issues arise with your new domain, you’re most likely to catch them in GWT under:

• Messages: If your site has received any warnings, these should be noted here.
• Manual Actions: If your site has received a manual penalty, all relevant information will be listed here.
• Index Status: Watch to ensure URLs on your old domain are consistently being de-indexed while your new URLs are being indexed.
• Crawl Errors: If Google is having trouble accessing any parts of your new site, you should see this here. This can sometimes be the result of errors in your new robots.txt file.
• Search Queries: As more of your content is indexed, you should also see a rise in the number of clicks and impressions your content gets.

Some Final Thoughts

While I’ve provided a general overview of the technical aspects of moving your site, there are a few best practices you should keep in mind to make sure the process runs as smoothly as possible:

• Be sure to let your followers, subscriber,s and email visitors know about the move well in advance. This is particularly important if you’re also changing your name or website design. Consider using a pop-up box on your site to let visitors know about the change, and using a transitional logo or byline to help maintain brand recognition (e.g., “Formerly known as…..”).
• Whenever possible, do page-to-page redirects rather than a sitewide redirect. This means directing your old pages to the most relevant pages on your new site – not just directing everything to your homepage.
• Be prepared to wait 3-6 months for your rankings to reach pre-move levels. For this reason, it’s important to avoid making the move during a busy time of year.
• Consider stepping up your game when it comes to PR following the move. This can help generate authoritative links to your new domain, boosting your rankings, and potentially speeding up the process of restoring your search traffic.