Domain migrations are one of those activities that even if in the long-term can represent a benefit for an SEO process -- especially if the new domain is more relevant, has already a high authority or give better geolocalization signals with a ccTLD -- can represent a risk for SEO because of the multiple tasks that should be performed correctly in order to avoid potential non-trivial crawling and indexing problems and consequential lost of rankings and organic traffic.
I did a quick research for a recent domain migration that I needed to supervise and realized that even if there are a few resources there isn't a complete list covering all of the different aspects that should be taken into consideration in order to implement and validate a domain migration from an SEO perspective.
The checklist - infographic for an SEO friendly domain migration process
With so few information I did a checklist compiling the different activities I needed perform during the different phases of the migration process -decision making, planning, implementation and monitoring- that was a great help to keep me on track and I would like to share through the following "infographic / checklist" where I have also added some of the tools that I used:
You can click on the image above to see a bigger version of the image or download it directly from here.
Please note that this is a checklist for a domain migration process -not a redesign, URL structure change or CMS migration, that would add more complexity and additional validation to the specified phases-.
Some of the articles that were of help to build this checklist -and would be also great if you can take a look at- are:
- Surviving a Site Migration [An SEO's Guide]
- Domain Migration – An SEO Case Study
- Best practices when moving your site
- Moving your site
- The 10 Step Site Migration Process
- SEO Migration Plan – Failure to Plan is a Plan to Fail
- Web Site Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs
I hope all this helps you as much it has helped me! What other aspects do you take into consideration to make sure SEO don't suffer from domain migrations?
Excellent infographic checklist for migration Aleyda! Yet one more awesome reference resource everyone should keep within reach!
Thank you Alan!
Thanks for the info here. I recently migrated 3 different website's which were on 3 domains but basically very similar sites. They all had a PR of 3 - after moving them all to 1 domain they now all have PR 0 !!! I have followed all the best practices - such as you have mentioned here. I did change the IP address - is that the reason!? I am really annoyed and don't know what to do.
Agree with Alan! I "pinned" it on Pinterest, very worthy, Aleyda!
Thank you very much Dana :D
Ditto, have pinned it too, great job Aleyda :-)
Really nice summary of a tricky topic. If most people followed half those bullet points, we'd be a lot more bored in Q&A.
Thanks Dr. Pete :)
You mean a CMS change alongside a domain migration with a handful of 301 redirects isn't standard? Seems to be the only way my clients know how to do it...
Seriously though, I like the thought that went into this. It would be nice to see you publish it as a printable PDF checklist.
On another note, I've always thought that a link building push is a good immediate followup to a domain migration. No particular evidence I've seen to support it, just seems like a good time to get some publicity momentum and start building links & trust to the new domain. Would love to hear if anyone does this as standard practice after a domain change.
Hello Kane!
It's always better to avoid parallel changes that add complexity but yes, I understand sometimes for clients means more time and sometimes technical expenses... I will do an extension to this one adding the scenario with the CMS change .. that sometimes also leads most of the times to a redesign and update of content.
The link building push after launching the new domain is a great practice and the quickest I would say, to alert Google you have migrated.. fresh links coming from social sources are the best for this :) It makes also sense to tell your community that you address have changed!
Thank you for your comment :D
Good points. Wanted to add 2 to your additional insight:
Again, well done graphic & steps!
Thank you for your comment Dana! Very good points... the first one is very important indeed :) I will need to do a second version, adding more scenarios (when changing also the CMS, design, content or URL structure).
It can also be useful to step up link acquisition prior to the changes that get picked up at stages across the transition - especially in messy www.domain.com / domain.com / www.domain.com/index.php / domain.com/index.php type situations. Consistent signals that reflect the new structure excelerate the transition.
Aleyda,
Great Infographic, Not too much use of Graphics, nothing over the top, it’s a perfect example of something that is simple yet informative :)
Thanks,
Sajeet
Thank you Sajeet :)
WOOt! Yes, I really missed the 5th "I am crazy" :D
Blocked by robots.txt or blocked by admin/pass directly?
CUSoon!
Hola Fer.. haha! next time i definitely need to add the "I'm crazy" part!
At the beginning an admin/pass blockage and also robots.txt in the new domain in order to avoid at all a content duplication issue (since we know how sometimes G doesn't take into consideration robots.txt blockage) - once you check the site is functional and works internally in the new domain, you eliminate the admin/pass blockage so you can implement and quickly test the 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one... then you eliminate the robots.txt blockage from the new domain :)
See you soon!
Hola Aleyda,
congrats for this post, very useful.
One question, would you try doing a test on a small part of the website, as Cutts himself suggested here instead of moving everything all across? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wATxftE8ooE&lr=1
I'm not sure about it, because I reckon I would lose part of the link juice to this part of the websites. Besides in many "how to" articles, there's no mention to this, not even in yours.
I'd very appreciate your thoughts on this.
Thank you in advance!
I love the fact that the infographic is a checklist. It's better than just a graphic... it's actually something someone can print out and check off as they follow the steps. It's not just an infographic, it's a checklistgraphic!
Yes Jeff! haha, love the term "checklistgraphic" :D Indeed, something you can easily have as a reference when doing a migration :)
Thats handy! Its now on the office wall. Thanks.
Great to hear that! Thank you
Hi Aleyda,
This is really very nice work done by you it is very helpful and i definitely use in my work, and can you please give me some more idea about othe techniques which are used in SEO...
Thanks.
Really great. an awesome infografic, more information resources. Thanks.
So the question is - what is your opinion on 301 redirects. I hear such mixed opinions. Is it optimal to repost the content or is 301 a safe bet?
Very informative guide, people often miss these stuff while migrating domains...
Amazing post. Thank you.
Thanks Aleyda! I'm actually in the middle of creating a checklist/best practice doc as well. Its great to see similar tools and methods being used.
I like the simplicity of the infographic - and yet the complexity of the whole process is clearly visible!
I kind of got "infographic-tired" these days - but this is really an exception. I like it!
Thank you Petra :)
Very Interesting information for webmasters and SEOs... sometimes on request of client, webmasters completely changed everything at once without even informing SEOs and that end up having big losses and sometimes the negative impacts are quite permanent.
This Infographics is actually quite a great guide for webmaster to consider every step while migrating website from one server to another.
Thank you :)
You forgot the fourth "if" choice at the top of the decision tree - "if I am crazy" https://searchengineland.com/you-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-be-nuts-to-worry-about-changing-your-domain-111957
haha! Thank you for sharing the article Andrew :)
Nice infographic Aleyda, which actually does a good couple with the post "Website migration guide - Tips for SEOs" published few days ago here, and with the added value of being "printable", so to have it in front of us while migrating a site :)
That post came out after Aleyda had submitted this post. I was just coming in to edit the post (with her permission) and add that link. Both are great resources!
Thank you Gianluca! Yes, my goal was to create something you can have easily have as a reference, like a visually attractive checklist when you migrate to make sure you are not missing anything of importance :)
Nice infographic I have saved it for future refrence. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
Thank you James for your comment! I hope is useful :)
Thanks for this Aleyda
Really useful and something I know a few of my connections will appreciate now that I've shared it.
Thanks for putting the time and effort into this.
Nicky
Thank you for reading :)
Thanks Aleyda for the blog, graphs and your time...
I'll be sharing this with our development team, great work...thanks again :)
wow, what a headache I have just from reading that. If someone is considering a migration they better have a very good reason. There is no way that this could be done without glitches. Thank you for presenting the enormity of it in this infographic.
Perfect, this is exactly what I was looking for, also loving the references...
Dan
As all other said for the most part EXCELLENT infographic. Awesome job!
Domain migration is absolutely a good way to start from scratch and thus anyone can make further desired improvements. I was working on a long tail domain name and now I am interested to migrate on a new more relevant domain name so that could easily make it SEO friendly. Checklist infographic is well structured and well designed and I would love to follow it after migration of my website.
Hi Aleyda,
My old style site www.urroyalty.com has a rank of 55.8 on woorank.com but it surprisingly ranks No. 1 on Google map results for keywords "limo san diego", "limousine san diego", "san diego limo", "san diego limousine", and my newer site www.asandiegolimo.com with higher woorank of 78.6 shows up in the organic section of Google first page down lower! should i migrate the older site to my newer one so my customers always land on my newer site and in doing so would i loose the top Google map ranking for my older site www.urroyalty.com ? or should i redirect 301 from older to the newer site?
This would be a good question for our Q&A section at https://moz.com/community/q/. Thanks!
Hi Aleyda,
I know it's quite old article already, but I wonder - did you ever create a follow up post with the more complex migration including a CMS change? You wrote in one comment here: "I will do an extension to this one adding the scenario with the CMS change .. that sometimes also leads most of the times to a redesign and update of content."
This is a helpful infographic, Aleyda. I just wish it came with a text-friendly checklist too :-)
Actually in my case it is not a domain redirection but a protocol redirection from http://www.sitename.co.uk to https://www.sitename.co.uk
I had started analysing this site recently and when checked via the redirect checker it shows a 302 redirect (from http to https). Google has indexed https version and it is showing https version in its search results. But all the links on the web are pointing towards http.
As I understand we need to change the redirection type from 302 to 301 and actually see the impact it has on the rankings and passing of the link juice. Subsequently we can build our rankings.
Can you please guide on the following:
What do you think which process should we follow in this case?
How much time it might take to pass the link juice?
How will we know the link juice has successfully transferred to https version?
When do you think will be safe for us to start building our further ranking?
Many thanks for your time.
Very helpful, thanks for posting Aleyda. Domain migration can be a tricky process for someone not knowing what they're doing, and if not done properly can really screw with rankings. I talk to way too many webmasters who have seen traffic drop up to 60% (along with the rest of their business), all which could have been avoided if this process was better managed.
Great post thnx. The download link and the image are both broken could not download or enlarge image.
Great! very usefull post.. thanks for sharing.
great post Aleyda, you have made everything so simple this process by this post :)
Thanks Khalid! I hope is useful :)
This is a great resource. I'm bookmarking it for future reference. With this inforgraphic there's no excuses if you forget something in a migration
Thank you Ricardo!
Hello Aleyda,
Just read this great post and Infographics and I found it very Informative for every Webmaster and SEO.
In these days, Such Inforgraphics are more helpful rether than full of written information on the posts. I am
keeping this in my SEO refernce data. If you would able to share any live example (of Site Migration) then It
would be great!!!
Cheers,
Vijay
Thanks Vijay! Next time I do one I will document all of the process and activities so I can share them.
nothing about if this is recommended for a panda or penalty url. I assume the thoughts are the same for moving this type of site?
Hello Rob, not really quite the scoop of this post... a domain migration would be the "extreme" option -and sometimes not necessarily a solution if you also migrate the cause of the problem, which is duplicated or low quality content in the case of a Panda penalty-. Some posts that might help you are: Beat Google Panda, 100% Panda Recovery: What We Learned to Identify Issues & Get Your Traffic Back, Replicate Google's Panda Questionnaire - Whiteboard Friday.
Hola Aleyda!
Well done, very good and useful infographics!
Just have one question...Did you check the rankings afterwards for the website you were revising?
I've been struggling a long time with the idea of migrating one domain of our company but the risk to lose rankings is too high. Reading some articles someone was talking about a possible loss of about 10% of the rankings.Cutts himself suggests to get at least the best links redirecting to the new domains, confirming that a loss of link juice is almost certain. But it's difficult to state which are the best links and how many need to be redirected to minimize the link juice loss.
Can you give me your opinion about it?
Thanks, and keep up posting here!
Hi Aleyda,
Amazing infographic Aleyda! from SEO Point of view, i am bookmarking this.. :) :)
Thank you Suresh!
brilliant :)
Great post!!! Great job on the infographic too. Thanks.
Don't forget Xenu for checking out any 404s you may need to 301 redirect before and after the move. I perffer it over Screaming Frog because it doesn't limit you to 500 URI like Screaming Frog's free version.
Thank you for your comment Ben!
Yes, other options to verify the site that offer similar functionalities to Screaming Frog are Xenu and Gsitecrawler. I previously used Gsitecrawler when Screaming Frog didn't existed and I only used Windows to work (I prefered it over Xenu, although Xenu is a great tool too).
Since now I also use a Mac for work and Screaming Frog has a Mac and also a Windows client I prefer it over the other tools and I pay the yearly fee that I find reasonable from what I got.
A tip if your site is big (not necessarily huge), want to use it and avoid the 500 URI restriction: If the site has a lot of internal pages but is well organized and has a hiearchical directory structure, you can crawl independently each main category / directory.
Migration made simple :) must pin infographics :)
Thank you Ketan! I'm glad you like it
yup I did .. I pinned as well.. But dont konw why someone did not like my comment :P
Probably someone who doesn't like Pinterest. :) This is a great idea for pinning!
Yes! I shared it in Pinterest too :D
ofcourse :) Infogrpahic pinning is a best way to share and grab knowledge .. I love it ..
Amazing infographic Aleyda, I'll embed it on my site if you don't mind.
Thank you Tom! You can for sure :)