Recently, I made the difficult decision to change the domain name of my blog and consulting website. It had to be done; the old name just didn't make sense anymore. No one could spell it, and it was terrible for SEO. Of course, I knew all of the rules of successful 301 redirection in theory, but when it came to putting theory into practice, I found myself dreading pulling the switch.
There have been plenty of good articles on SEOmoz and elsewhere about the technical aspects of 301 redirection, but I felt a lot of uncertainty about the timeline of re-establishing my presence on Google (inbound links, PR, etc.). So, I decided to track my progress daily, mostly to calm my own paranoia, but also as a bit of a case study in what a 301 redirection process looks like. I finally finished collecting data when my PageRank was established over the weekend, and this article is a recap of my experience.
Technical Details
The site itself is relatively small (my business blog, primarily), but has steady traffic and had established PR and a healthy number of inbound links for its size. The site is powered by PHP/MySQL, and I used Apache rewrites for redirection. The new domain was registered less than two months before the transfer and had no history (according to the Internet Archive), so it was "new" in every sense of the word. The transfer itself happened on August 22, 2007. I should also add that I did 3 things immediately upon relaunch:
(1) I established a new sitemap and profile in Webmaster Tools.
(2) I reached out to everyone in my community who linked to me and announced the change, requesting that they update their links to the new domain.
(3) I updated all of my RSS/Feedburner links to the new domain.
Results: Indexed Pages
So, let's talk data: the figure above shows Google's daily count of the indexed pages from the transfer until the end of data collection. Google began spidering pages on the site within less than a week of the transfer, and the indexed page count jumped to 111 (exceeding the original count of 91) on September 4th, just 13 days after the transfer. Of course, since the site is primarily a blog, the total number of pages have increased consistently over time.
Results: Inbound Links
Although the graph over the full course of the experiment looks a bit different than the last one, inbound links also surged 13 days after transfer, jumping up to 739. Unlike indexed pages, there was no gradual increase in the preceding two weeks; the count simply registered all at once. Just a note: In the interest of keeping the graphs consistent, I left in the numbers after the count was restored, but due to an anomaly that temporarily bumped my inbound link count over 10,000, had to cut the graph off artificially.
Results: PageRank
Finally, the one troublesome piece of data that held up this entire experiment: on October 27th, as part of Google's recent shuffle, the new domain finally registered a PageRank, jumping back to the original PR of 5. This was an overnight jump, and is consistent with Google's past practice of updating PRs on a roughly quarterly basis (ignoring the recent update drought).
Does PageRank Matter?
The PR graph raises an obvious question: how did my site fare with two months of being treated as a non-entity by Google? The previous data gives the first part of the answer: even without verified PageRank, Google obviously recognized and indexed my site. More importantly, the site started to appear in search results almost immediately upon being indexed. In the first two weeks, a search for the site's name pulled it up within the top 10.
In addition, I conducted a bit of an experiment within the experiment. During the month of October, I coined two phrases on my blog: "Google threshold" and "midstream usability." Both appeared near the top of Google search results within 1-2 days of the entries initially being posted, a clear sign that Google was treating the site kindly.
Sometimes, It's Good to be Scared
In this Halloween season, it's good to remember that a little fear isn't always a bad thing. You should never go into something as important as a domain change with too much confidence, but I hope that this case study illustrates that, properly planned, a full 301 redirection doesn't have to be too scary.
mattbot is scary and is going to give me nightmares. is that part of your "experimental psychology"?
Sorry, I meant that as an homage. It turned out slightly more frightening than I anticipated.
I can tell you this, though: my cousin's boss's stylist used to do Vanessa Fox's nails, and I have it on authority that Google is experimenting with technologically enhancing Matt Cutts to create an army of cybernetic super bloggers. Don't tell anyone I told you.
Mattbot says: ACCESS DENIED TO MATTBOT PROGRAM
Seriously though, I'm glad that the move went well.
Thanks, Matt. You know what they say: putting someone's head on a robot body is the sincerest form of flattery.
Please don't sue me :)
Dr. Pete,
glad to hear that all seemed to have gone well. It's always a little unnerving making these kinds of changes... which is good... keeps us on our toes.
Given the luxury of time and resources, in moving from one domain to another (though would hold true for any change), I'd recommend:
This way you minimize the variances, make sure the new pages have good indexation, and use your own authority to start to say "yes, this is where you should go for this content."
Of course, that degree of management may not always be possible, and in all cases, it is still a matter of risk vs. reward.
And I thought I was thorough :) If the stakes had been a bit higher, I probably would've been even more careful about the process. Fortunately, I had some room to play on this one. I would really love to see a similar case study of a large, commercial site.
I think you did a great job.
There's an infinite number of potential things to impact how well, how fast, etc., that I don't think anyone could ever truly cover everything.
And even then, even if you did everything completely correctly, there's still probably a chance for things to go awry. There's probably still a little dip in rankings, but correction is probably faster with everything in place. And of course, how much of an authority your site is no doubt weighs in on everything as well.
The good thing is that the engines are getting smarter about figuring out what's what, so even if you don't cover all the bases, I think they will continue to be able to sort things out on their own faster and faster.
The big question on my mind: did you take visitors graphs from the months before, and compare them to the visitor graphs in this month?
I love all the stats, really do, but you're missing the one true thing that matters in my humble opinion :)
I did have data from before the transition, but I mainly used the baseline levels from just before the switchover (the "Original" level shown on each chart above). I wasn't so much looking for the trends as I was for the point at which the metrics on the new domain met or exceeded the same metrics on the old domain.
Yeah but I'd love to see a graph of your daily visitors in there :)
Ah, understood. I'm not opposed to giving out that information, but the before/after was very noisy. As part of my domain transfer, I was also in the midst of a redesign, which really cut into my blog posting. After the transfer, I hit the content hard and had some good luck attracting traffic. For instance, the day before Google registered my back-links, I had 10 visitors; the day after I had 90 visitors. Coincidentally, though, that same day one of my posts hit StumbleUpon, so I can't really separate out what was due to the re-establishment of those links and what was just luck and online marketing.
Yeah, that sucks... I'm getting some very very good data on a switch like this soon, trying to get the client to allow me to use it.
That's a hard call; I've had to forego some juicy SEO blog posts due to concerns about protecting clients' data. It would definitely be interesting to see these same trends for a much larger site with a deeper link structure.
Great post DrPete. Now that you've established that you know what you are doing, on your blog usereffect.com you might post something like this:
10 Steps to Painless 301 Redirection
I personally guarantee many incoming links. Ok, I can't guarantee many, only one. But it sounds like a good idea to me.
edit - Do it soon, before I steal the idea.
I do like the title, Dr. D., but I have to admit I haven't quite worked out how to linkbait on my own blog yet. I'm trying to keep the SEO stuff to the SEO/usability interface, which is why I subject SEOmoz to so many random thoughts.
Linkbait or not, it would be useful information, and I for one haven't seen a good step by step how to on that particular subject. The thing to do would have been to post that article before this one, and then point back to it from here. It would at least have been Sphunn. (Sphinned?) Probably would be anyway.
I'm telling you - tick tock:)
You should also make it 7 steps to..
I saw some (admittedly meaningless) research sugegsting that 7 titles did better than any other number. Maybe just because it stands out as different.
Dr. Pete,
Thanks for sharing! This is really very detailed data on a topic that is not often experimented with.
Question for you: Would you be able to share how your organic search referrals from the top engines (G, Y, MSN/Live, Ask) fared through the transition? Feel free to leave out exact numbers, of course. I'm really interested to see if there was a hiccup in referrals from any of the engines as they un-indexed and then re-indexed the site. And specifically, if any of the top engines reacted negatively to the move.
Some of the sites I work with get +80% of their organic referrals from G, others are reversed with most organic referrals coming from Yahoo. I'm curious if there is more risk involved depending on which engines are responsible for the sites traffic.
Thanks again for your post. --Erika
A couple of people have asked, and the honest truth is that I just don't have a lot of reliable data on that. My traffic had slowed down a bit before the domain switch (mostly due to the redesign taking up too much of my time) and then jumped up quite a bit after the redirection, but mainly due to spending a lot more time writing and networking. So, I can't really separate out the before and after of my search traffic in a way that would mean much. I played around with a graph or two and it looked like noise.
It would definitely be interesting to hear a 301 experience from someone with a large, established, commercial site.
Dr. Pete,
Great post however; I do have one comment about PageRank. Since PageRank is an algorithm based on the number and power of inbound links to each page, the very first time Google visits your page(s) it has calculated the PageRank. Each time the Googlebot re-visits your page(s) it will re-calculate the PR with the new information it has acquired (301 redirects, new links....). Also since PageRank is algorithmic / logorithmic your PR could be a 5.2534762/10 however; the Google toolbar will only show you as a 5/10.
When Google does its "quarterly" PR updates, they are not actually (I believe) updating the PR. They are just updating the toolbar display which is how WE see PageRank and not how Google sees PageRank.
Good point, Aaron. Obviously, the data suggest that Google recognized the site by all measures that mattered within a couple of weeks, but the "official", publicly available PR trailed that by a couple of months. Yet one more indicator that PR isn't worth so much hair-pulling.
Excellent dissertation. Now I know how you got the Dr. moniker.
There was that whole 5 extra years of school thing, too :) Today's trivia about me: I was trained as a cognitive/experimental psychologist.
"experimental psychologist" - that sounds kinda creepy!
I'm guessing that's why the handle Dr Pete!
This brings up images of the opening scene to Ghostbusters...
VENKMAN Now just clear your mind and tell me what you see.He turns over a card with a circle on it. COED (thinks hard) Is it a star? VENKMAN (feigning surprise) It is a star! That's great. You're very good.
I love that scene. You haven't had real fun until you've repeatedly shocked a few undergrads for no good reason.
i recently sorted out a cross browser canonical issue using 301 and it only took 1 week for the listings to resolve... vnice!
Where are you getting your link data from? In my experience Google will usually show the originating link to the old domain as belonging to the new site while Yahoo usually will not show any back links that have been redirected.
Has that changed?
Also how are you tracking and graphing the info. Manually or automated and at what intervals?
Wow, I'm getting some tough questions. That's what I love about SEOmoz; I always learn something new, even if it's my post.
The graphed link data is from Google Webmaster Tools. I did check on Site Explorer but didn't follow that data closely. I was mainly interested in the relative linkbacks as compared to pre-transfer, so the absolute accuracy didn't concern me too much. At this point both Google and Yahoo! show a pretty similar pattern of inbound links, but I can't say if they were comparable early on. If anyone else in the community has some experience with that, it would certainly be interesting.
The data was collected manually, on a daily basis. A bit time-consuming, but it seemed like the most reliable way, since Google doesn't make historical index data available (although that seems to be changing). The graphs were just done in Excel.
Dr. Pete
While the traffic data from before and after may be pretty noisy, the rank for individual keywords should be a reliable indicator and answer the question of whether the 301 preserved your ranking.
You can login to your WMC account and download the query stats from the statistics page for the last week and then for say a month ago.
If you download the all query stats report and then process the file through https://www.cumbrowski.com/googlestatsconverter.asp or other similiar tools, you can see what terms you ranked for before and after the switch.
This data would be very interesting.
Let me know if you need more explanation of what I am talking about.
Jonah
Hahaha, "just the sound of my own awesomeness".
LOVE it Pete.
Matt, I agree that is a classic line!
Nice Article... really enjoyed it!
Jason
Great post, dr pete! It is good to know that 301 redirects do actually work... if I had any PR to speak of, I would now certainly have reduced fear when attempting to redirect it...
Really good to have some data on this. We get a lot of clients that are scared crazy to move domains and now I've got some numbers to share on what general timeframes have been seen by other sites that have 301-ed.
Thanks for documenting the whole experience! It's great to see something other than SEO theory for this subject. Do you think the process would have had a better outcome if you used an older domain?
Do you mean moving from an older domain or to an older domain?
Maybe I am not being clear. I am switching my website FROM the domain www.steak-dinner.com to the domain
www.4NevadaHomeLoans.com. Steak-dinner has been around since 2003 and it is well established so I don't want to shut down the domain just in case. So I want to 301 REDIRECT Steak-Dinner to 4NVHomeLoans so that I don't get dinged for duplicate content. Currently it is forwarded but I wasn't sure if it was forwarded with a 301 REDIRECT.
When I called to ask he said that the 301 REDIRECT was a unix/linux thing and I did not have to worry about the duplicate content thing because this was a windows based hosting account.
Is he just blowing smoke or am I not being clear with him.
Got it. It would really depend on how it was forwarded. Technically, there are ways to redirect traffic from a site without it being clear to the internet at large that you're permanently redirecting (the whole point of a 301). In that case, people who visited the old site would hit the new site, but Google would never transfer your authority/PR/links, etc.
Although many people who talk about the how-to of 301s may mention it in the context of Linux/Apache (just because it handles the mechanics well), a 301 redirect is in no way platform specific. It's one of the major status codes that's been around since the early days of the worldwide web. Being on a Windows server makes no difference, outside of implementing the 301.
So should I insist that he use a 301 Redirect?
Also, the steak-dinner is currently PR2 with 330 links to it. If I use a 301 redirect will my PR transfer?
I would insist on it, yes. Your PR and links should transfer, although, as the article discusses, PR can take a while. For PR=2, I wouldn't worry about it too much, but you'll definitely be better off 301'ing the right way. No sense losing what you've worked to build, SEO-wise.
Feel free to hit my site from my SEOmoz profile and email me (the "About" tab); I'd be happy to answer any questions and don't want to tie up the public forum too much.
A sigh of relief this end, changing domain names for newley aquired clients, to better optimise them is always a concern, but sometimes it is simply required. Your Case Study has given me the confidence to "Just Do It", I await the results tentativly.
One extra caution though here is the domain age.
Taking a domain that is 3 or more years old and moving to one that is registered today has a lot more to deal with than just 301s.
This is where you really have to weigh out what makes the most sense overall, and the pros and cons of doing so.
Agreed. One big factor is branding. My old brand, well frankly it sucked, which is part of why I made the switch. If your client has a recognized name or URL, the decision to change that name goes far deeper than just traffic and SEO.
Dr. Pete, I will keep abreast of my domain change. Hopefully, everything will work out. Thanks for your help.
Absolutely... that's what makes SEO so fascinating.... the intersection of good old traditional marketing with technology.
SEO requires a bit of Kenny Rogers channeling... "you have to know when to hold 'em; know when to fold 'em"...always weighing and measuring the short-term against the long-term, and managing risk.
I am in the process of changing my site over to a new domain. I was just told by my web host that a windows based site does not need a 301 Redirect? Is this true?
You're switching the domain completely, right (i.e. not just changing hosts)? Unless windows servers have some new and magical feature I'm not aware of, I would venture to say that your host either doesn't know what you're talking about or doesn't know what they're talking about. You can change IPs with no issue if you keep the same domain, but nothing can automatically link an old and new domain without someone indicating that the two are connected.
The issue is probably more a matter of how these are handled on Apache/Linux versus Windows/IIS. It's important to keep in mind that, at a technical level versus a SEO level, many may see a redirect is a redirect is a redirect... the net result is the destination. But, in regards to SEO, it isn't just the destination, but how you get there that matters.
McAnerin probably has one of the better detailed explanations I've come acress in dealing with IIS redirects.
You're right ! Being suspicious gives good opportunities, that's one of the best tool from marketers.. and poker player ;-)
Do you think moving with 301'ing from a +5 years old to a brand new domain and doing at the same time a deep seo in page tags, titles and desc could be a way to get a better PR or juice?
I'm thinking about such a process for one of my project and wanted to know if someone already had this kind of situation?
Hello Dr. Pete!
We had really bad experience with Google and 301. We had to switch just one pagename on velemeny.com and it took weeks before Google accepted the new one, eve though the sitemap was refreshed, the 301 was in place immediately.
Now, we want to switch to friendly URL-s, and I'm already stressed about it...
Anyway, good article! :)
We will be working with a client shortly that will be migrating thousands of pages with 301s. They acquired another Website and are bringing everything under one roof. I will let you know if we see similar results.
We will be working with a client shortly that will be migrating thousands of pages with 301s. They acquired another Website and are bringing everything under one roof. I will let you know if we see similar results.
Wow. I like it. Especially the fact that you actually GAINED indexed pages in the switch. I assumed that some juice would be lost in the transfer, but I guess it's nice to be surprised sometimes.
I would guess that the increase came when everyone updated their page links to match your new site. Google, seeing a few inbound, sudden links, jumped all over the new site. Possible? I think so? heh.
I tried to add 301 redirects for certain internal pages on one of my sites, and it seems like some of them I regain the links and PR and some I never do, while doing the same thing. Any idea why that might happen?
Question about the value of the domains / urls.
We are considering to 301 a page like this www.site.com/topic to www.site.com/us/en/page.aspx¶1=topic or similar.
With a 301 I keep traffic, links, PR, fine. But what about the value of the first url? As 'topic' is much better positioned than in a parameter, I would loose the SEO value of that domain / url the moment I don't use this url any more but the other one.
Any idea on these?
Andreas
You keep the inbound link "juice" to that URL, but you lose the SEO and usability benefits of the original URL. Index-wise, it essentially ceases to exist. I'm not clear I understand the situation, but this seems like a bad direction to go - you could always use a rewrite of some sort or even a 302 and keep the existing URL public (but point it to the dynamic URL behind the scenes). Feel free to follow up in Q&A with specifics.
It is messing up our international results, that's why we're thinking about this, but don't really want to. There seem to be some large inconsistencies when working with complex international sites.
thanks so far
andreas
Very interesting read, and I appreciated the graphs.
Interesting. Of related note, OneCall has changed it's URL structure a billion times in its 10 year web history. When I started here a little over a year ago, I started pounding away at 301'ing all of the 404s we were showing in WMC.
Just recently we had a situation wherein we had 47,000+ pages indexed in Google that were exact content duplicates to other pages. This was caused by an Endeca implementation and the use of a parameter in the URL that didn't actually change any site content.
Depending on the DC you hit, you will notice that there are now only about 22,000 old pages in the index. It has only taken about two weeks to get rid of half of these pages. Now granted, according to WMC, Googlebot hits 18,203 pages a day on the OneCall.com site, so I guess I could expect problems to resolve fairly quick. ;-)
Here is an advanced search if you want to track the progress of the duplicate content removals (I 301'd all the dups to the correct pages):
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.onecall.com+inurl:Ne%3D&hl=en&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-23,GGLG:en&filter=0
David Payne
Excellent indeed!
Very good post. I have never redirected a site through a 301 but I have foten wondered if the process was as smooth as some say.
Thanks.
This was very helpful, but I must admit, I am still scared to make a domain name change that I think would be beneficial. :-)
great article :)
Thanks for the article Pete. I'm in a similar situation or will be as I'm planning a move to a new domain hopefully in the very near future.
Just like you I know what I'm supposed to do and understand how the move should work, but there's still that lingering fear in the back of my mind.
I'm not sure how much of a difference it will make, but my new domain has been hosted for quite some time already and I linked to it to get the domain indexed. There's only one visible page (or should be) at the moment. My thinking was search engines would already have a record of the domain and an associated age with it when I do make the transfer.
The one thing you did that I'm not sure I'll do is create a new Google Sitemap. I've debated its necessity, but given your experience I may try. On the other hand I could skip it and compare my results with your own.
Thanks again for helping to alleviate some fears.
Admittedly, I can't back this up with hard numbers, but my experience is that sitemaps are pretty helpful when it comes to getting pages initially discovered.
If the domain has a history and the spiders are already coming to it, I'm sure that doesn't hurt. One thing I'm curious about, though: what happens if the new domain already has an established PR (let's say you bought it) and then you redirect an old domain with a different PR. Does the previous PR on the new domain get cancelled out, or is there some kind of averaging process?
What I tend to do is submit sitemaps with the OLD indexed URL's in it, to make it index the 301 sooner.
;) That's smart
This is truly good info. I'd be afraid I would do one little thing wrong and get kicked into the deserts of oblivion. But I've always been that way. Thanks!!!
Thanks for the info! It's good to see that the practical side actually follows the theoretical...
We've done a 301 domain change with a few smaller sites, but mostly with clients that were not very discerning (as in: do what you think is best and don't bother me with it and get me some new business cards while you're at it).
We never did it with a website of above 100 pages though. I can imagine the stress it must have put you through. Do you have any nails left? Mine would have been gone after the first day and I'd be gnawing on bare flesh before the first page was shown as redirected in Google. Kudos.
That's all great info - thank you for sharing it with us.
What I believe is missing is a bit of insight on how your ranking did in the interim period, i.e. how did your positioning work out ?
In my experience there is a loss in visibility and I have seen cases where the loss is significant and lasting in time.
It would be nice if you have some data to put out in this respect as well.
Wow. Excellent post Pete. Maybe it's because I'm a math geek, but I always love posts with actual data.
Random related question for anybody: If I have two urls on my site that point to the same piece of content (yay Joomla), and one of the urls has a bunch of links, and the other has none (or very few), should it matter which url I redirect from/to?
Good stuff... thank you!
Excellent post! Must say that 301 redirects are always daunting, especially when a client is nervous about their new domain. I think I'll start reading your blog. :)
Very nice to see actual results from an effort such as this without having to experience / risk it personally. Thanks for the case study!
A nice informative post there Pet - good work; one thing that I don't think has been mentioned is anything about your experiment within an experimentt.
I hope I'm not beiong nit-picky but I just wanted to add that the reason you probably ranked well for those two phrases even njust after a move was that they are uncompetitive terms. I'm not sure you'd be so lucky if you'd been looking to rank for anything people make money out of!
;)
You're absolutely right; I should've mentioned that that's exactly why I did it. When I used the terms, I looked them up and realized they weren't competitive, so I figured they'd be a good test to see how quickly I was getting indexed. I was using it more as an indicator of being noticed than of the strength of those pages.
Gotcha!
Thanks Dr. Pete. I'd love to change my domain name, but I'm just too scared. Even with your reassuring information.
I certainly wouldn't recommend taking a domain-change lightly, but if it's the right decision for branding/business, don't let the technological aspects hold you back. I think it helps that I used to manage hosting transitions for clients from the IT side, so I've learned to plan carefully and pre-think the potential disasters. If you brainstorm all of the things you need to change to reflect the new domain (RSS feeds, online profiles, business cards, etc.) and get it all on paper, you'll be fine.
Nice post Dr Pete - one thing you seem to have missed which I would have been interested in is the same data for the old domain?
How long did it take for the old domain to be 'removed' from the index? Did it happen at the same time as the new one entered the index?
Given Google's minty fresh indexing of pages I've been amazed sometimes at how slow it can be at removing pages which are 301'd elsewhere.
Interesting question, Tom; I have to admit that I didn't track it very closely in my eagerness to follow the new domain. Currently, I still pull up about 40 pages in the Google index for the old name (it had 91 when I made the switch), so there are definitely some stragglers. It hasn't created any issues that I can see, in terms of duplicate content, etc., and none of the results on the old domain have appeared in any searches that I've done in the past month. The biggest problem I've had with cross-domain confusion seems to be Technorati, which handles redirection about as intelligently as a brain damaged chimp.
One thing I did learn: if you want to follow both the old and new domains, don't remove any of your profiles from Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, etc. Re-establishing ownership once you're 301'ing the entire old domain is a royal pain.
I guess if the pages aren't ranking anywhere then there's no real need to worry about them but it's something I've encountered in the past with inner pages still ranking and Google just failing to notice the 301.
"which handles redirection about as intelligently as a brain damaged chimp"
LOL - I'll bear that in mind :-)
The point about the inner pages is good to know. Being primarily a blog, none of the site's page were particularly "deep", architecturally speaking. I can see how some internal pages, less-visited pages, could be updated on a different timeline, and it would be interesting to see the transition points at which pages on the new domain started to outrank pages on the old domain in the SERPs for a larger site.
Regarding technorati: just email them through the support thing on technorati.com, i've done that before and they've always fixed redirect issues for me.
Unfortunately, after I hunted the Technorati FAQ and it told me to contact them regarding redirection, I did, and they emailed me with a link to that same FAQ post (that told me to contact them in the first place). That seemed like it was going to end badly, so I admit I may have given up a little early :)
Now, I'm having an issue that some of my popular posts are splintering on Technorati, as if they were their own sites. I saw the same thing for some SEOmoz referring posts. I'm not sure what they're doing over there.
Nice post. A very informative case study and one worth tucking away for future reference to allay the paranoia factor of changing domains - not to mention a useful userguide and benchmark. Well done. Thanks.