This is the first of hopefully many mini-guides I will be writing to give straightforward answers to commonly asked SEO questions. (Thanks Dr. Pete of User Effect for the idea!) Feel free to offer suggestions for future mini-guides in the comments.
Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings. This is because the major search engines use metrics on both the domain level and the page level to determine rankings. When a webmaster decides to switch to a brand new domain, they are resetting their domain metrics to zero whether they know it or not. Luckily, there are steps one can take to minimize and in many cases completely negate the affects of a domain move.
SEO Guide: How to Properly Move Domains
Task: Redirect all of the pages from one domain to an entirely different domain.
Example of End Result: www.example-old-site.com/ and all of it's pages redirect to www.example-new-site.com/ and it's corresponding pages.
Note: You will need to maintain control of the old domain so that the 301 redirects stay valid.
If you have any domain switching tips tricks or advice that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny. Thanks!
Thanks for putting this together Danny!
One addition: Don't forget to change the internal links on the new domain to point to the correct URLs.
As in updating erroneous absolute URLs or do you mean something else?
Right. Let's say you're moving the content of Page123 from domain A to domain B and it has an internal link to to Page456, you want to make sure the internal link goes to the correct domain.
It wouldn't matter if you're using relative URLs. However, this Yoast article has me thinking about whether or not using relative URLs is a good thing: https://yoast.com/dev-blog/relative-urls-issues/
I work on a content site with a highly ranked domain. We're starting a site on a new domain and moving some of the content of the original domain to the new site. Our original site has thousands of links to the content that is moving. We will definitely use 301 redirects. Should we also update the thousands of links on the original domain OR will the 301s do the job? Is there any difference from an SEO perspective?
And finally, check, check and re-check...we had a situation where all the people in the "chain" said they had completed every stage of a 50,000 page site move...all seemed to go well, a comprhensive review of 5,000 sample redirects all tested positive...and a week later the site had disappeared...it seems that a junior developer on the new site had added "noindex,nofollow" robots meta tag in the header of all page templates whilst in staging/production testing, he thought it was a smart thing to do in the semi-live development/testing stage - but he forgot to remove it...after a couple of days of hair pulling it was finally picked up and eventually all came good...but a lesson learned none-the-less.
Hey Danny, I really like your checklist style of SEO guides. They really sort it all out nicely, and they are becoming your signature style.
You should include plenty of them in your upcoming book as they appear to be great favorites amongst the SEO community.
This was yet another solid post hombre.
Appreciate it! Checkboxes are good...
Can you please explain 6th point which start with 'In a development environmen'
Thanks for the post, I have followed all the steps while moving from https://data-flair.com/ to https://data-flair.training/ but my blogs (https://data-flair.training/blogs) are not getting index, any help is highly appreciated..
Thanks in advance.
Hi there! This is a great question for our Q&A forum. You may even figure out a resolution to your own problem by searching for questions similar to yours that have already been answered. Best of luck to you! :D
I'm reaching through to give you a big Moz hug!! Dr. Pete deserves a few, too!
I had not paid attention to the the Change of Address form in GWT, great tip and overall plan!
Add? Should email forwards be part of the checklist?. A friend decided to simply do a DNS switch to a new domain on a weekend (no strategic process), and she just thought emails would follow.
Hey Danny,
Thanks for posting these steps. Excellent. We did a rebrading and redesign for a company that was in business for 10 years. It was a week after GWT added the change of address tool. We worked out the same way and it is picked up by the search engines real quick. It is doing excellent now. What I missed was creating a sitemap for the old domain name. That make sense and I will give a try now. Thanks ro Dr Pete for gving this Idea. I read Your Blog daily and now do Dr Petes.
One other thing to notice is the back link changing process. You may need to contact the webmasters of the websites that were linking tothe od domain and have them link to the new one.
Thanks for the list; I expect to be pointing a lot of people here in the future.
My added point at the end is usually:
if your site carries linkbait, etc, then immediately post-domain-change would be a great time to launch new linkbait content, and get a first strong influx of links to the new domain.
Domain moving is very difficult. Worth the time to mvoe slowly and deliberately.
Hello Danny,
I would like to as what if I redirect my old domain to an existing domain?
I had 2 domains, and decided to merge them, so redirected domain A.com to domain B.com, and now I see an awful drop in SERP for domain B.com.
Is there anything i should do? Like it's better to keep both domains?
Or i should just wait for the SERP to come back to it's usual positions? (As I think if i failed it can never happen)
I'm aware this is a very old thread but the checklist is still accurate. The only thing I'd add is don't forget to update your adwords, microsoft add centre etc...
Thanks for the checklist.
Excellent post indeed!I just have a question. You say:
"In a development environment, test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain"
How is this done?I would be grateful if you could clarify this. Thank you.
Thanks Danny... I keep thinking I should write this down, but as long as I can keep coming back here prior to moving any site I'll be in good shape!
It's a great list.
Wow this is a really useful post, i had it bookmarked within mere sentences! There are some great points here that i never even thought of! Especially combining the aspects of 404 and 301s with google's webmaster tools.
Thanks!
I am tired of searching this problem on the internet and couldn't find a single question or any solution anywhere. Please help me out on this, as it is very important for me to know.
My question is:
Q. Can i redirect my website to 2 different websites at the same time, in this way? 1) 301 redirection to one website
2) IP based redirection to another website.
Is there any problem in sense of SEO?
If yes, then how and what can be the best solution?
A quick answer will be appreciated as it is a big mystery for me.
Thanks
Deepak Negi
I'd also like to add that just prior to the move, you turn off all internet advertising, adwords, media buys, you name it, in case you miss some of the redirects. It can very expensive, very quickly if you're sending paid traffic to a 404 page.
Remember to update the desintation URL's in your campaigns too. I wouldn't be relying too much on 301's.
Hi...
Thank u for a great article...
There is a note at the end, that one will need to keep the old domain active for the redirects to keep working.
I understand that.
Though my intention is to change to a new domain...and allow the old one to expire at some point.
So ...the question that arises is:
How long do I need to keep the old domain active..for search engines to properly process the change of address on all levels, so I can 'let go' of the old domain?
All the described steps here are about maintaining SEO power while transferring to a new domain.
In my case I dont want to keep the old domain name.
What is the best practice in this case...?
Kind thanks.
Thanks for the List! But I think I can not use it for the following problem do i?
I bought an domain (say A.com) wich ranks first place for the keyword (say "car") i want to rank with my old page (say B.com). Now i am wondering, if i could 301 redirect A.com to B.com and rank well for car with B.com? B.com has an other site structure and it's not possible to put all the content from B.com to A.com. A.com is about 10 years old and B.com is about 2 month old. There are just a few liks to A.com and just a few to B.com.
Thank you for the interest in my problem!
Thats a very interesting question!
Actually i am quite eager to read, what the experts think about a full Domain Redirect from a very heavily linked older Domain to a not so heavily linked newer Domain (with related Content).
With the term "full Domain Redirect" i mean to redirect all Subpages from the old Domain to their equivalent Subpages on the new Domain...
Thanks!
Good question,
If at all possible, you should repost the content on the new domain. Not only does this ensure that the traffic stays on the domain (low bounce rate) but it makes sure that the traffic is sent there in the first place. (I.E. You can't expect to rank for content if you don't repost it)
If you don't care about either of these two things (even though you should), you will likely see a rankings boost if you 301 the old domain to the new. This is the result of the addition of domain link juice. That said, if you try this "trick" with too many domains it will be identified and likely penalized. I wouldn't do this with more than one domain without reposting the content.
Thanks... and what about internal linking structure?
I think it is also recommended, that the new domain will have to re-implement (nearly) the same information structure as the old domain, or am i wrong?
Hi Danny, is there a difference on what date I'm repostim my content? As I can repost it on the same day it was originally posted or on the present day.
Thanks
Danny-
Can you help me to understand the use of a custom 404?
If as many 1:1 301 redirects are set up as possible, should everything else just be swept over to the new domain, or caught in the custom 404? Or is it a combination of both? I would love to better understand how this happens under the hood.
Thanks kindly,
Julie
After uploading data to my new website,do i need to delete the data from old website?
And worked like a charm. Hurray!
Hi Danny,
For clarification would you agree that 301 redirecting a domain that hasn't hosted a website before doesn't pass on any benefit from an SEO point of view? Lets assume that you own .info and net versions of your main website which for argument sake is something.com then would it be better do you think to create microsites on the .info and .net sites to allow them to rank in their own right before applying the 301 redirect?
Steve
How long should you maintain control of your old domain? My boss is upgrading his site for the third time in 15 years and still maintains pages from his original site because they are ranked high in some Google Searches.This seems a bit over-the-top.
Thanks!
If we are still going with this thread:
I did all the above from the guide. 36hours later I changed my mind about the domain move.
But this guide worked so well Google had already indexed and was showing results for one page on the new SiteB domain, Bing had indexed and showed the new SiteB domain at no1 for exact match search.
What should I do to reverse the domain change and go back to my original site?
So far I deleted the new domain, deleted it from webmaster and bing webmaster. Revoked the address change option in webmaster and set up a 1:1 301 on SiteB back to original SiteA.
Is this correct? Will this have a permanent after effect drag on my SiteA forever now?
I'm sure you all know the answer to my question as I now know it was a really basic question. If there are any other novices, like me, then the answer is it seems to have resolved itself. Or is in the process, google seems better than bing for working things out.
I also managed to put a change of address request from SiteB back to SiteA.
I have a few odd things like SiteA is showing as having links from SiteB in webmaster.
It's certainly not helping my rankings.
Moral being make sure you want to change before moving domain as it will mess things up if you change your mind.
Also the guide works a treat if you really are moving domains, too well in my case.
Rather than doing 301s for each separate page, can you not just do a 301 with wildcard from the old domain to the new?
I have my blog at www.blog.practo.com and wish to shift it to practo.com/blog since from an SEO point of view I dont think having good content on blog.practo.com is going to help.
Without having to move the WP instance to /blog can I have all my urls directing as www.practo.com/blog/articles and still work to update the blog from www.blog.practo.com
Is this possible and advisible?
Hello
Great info here. Could I just ask I have set up my 301 on my wordpress blog. I have duplicated the content from the old blog and put it on my new wordpress blog " new URL "
Google is now seeing the duplicated content on the new urls and indexing them ... do I now take down the old urls or just leave them I really want to take the old site down...
Thank you
Hi Photostudio,
I think you should give some time before doing this. Let google give all the credits (page rank, ranking, etc.) to the new website and all its sub pages. Once you are confirmed all your new pages are listed in google and have been equaly valued by Google, you can take your old website down.
But on the other hand after taking your website down, it may be a bad experience for your visitors because many of them may be looking for the old URLs, that time it will be a problem in sense of user experience.
Hi, thanks for the great guide! I have a question, if I'm moving my sub-domain pages into the main domain.
For example:
https://www.shop.domain-name1.com/category/subcat/product.html to
https://www.domain-name1.com/category/subcat/product.html
is this considered moving to a new domain? Are all these steps still necessary? Since it's a sub-domain to the main domain. Thanks!
Yes, it does work this way as well!
I need to redirect my old domain name as well as many pages (not all) to my new domain name (this). Both the sites have different structure.
Will it be right to do that (301 redirect from old domain name and few urls to new domain name and corresponding urls)
Help please.
This is an older post, so you may not get too much feedback. It'd be a great question to ask in our Q&A section at https://moz.com/community/q
Hello Danny Sir, It's good to read your post. I have an issue that I have changed my website https://unlimitedanimationmovies.com to new domain https://uamovies.ws/ . I have used 301 redirection. But I have not received all backlinks. So my traffic is also get reduced to 95%. I mean 10,000 traffic changed into 1000 traffic only.
What to do Sir? How can I get the authority of my previous website? How much time it will take?
I was thinking that I should change it back to previous domain. Should I?
Please help me.. I shall be very thankful to you.
Hi Jennie!
I'd just like to let you know that you'll actually have a much better chance of getting your questions answered if you post them in our Q&A forum. :) Thanks!
I've been using networksolutions antiquated website builder tool and want a more responsive website. I already have a nice responsive mobile site with dudamobile. However I'm nervous to move my desktop site from networksolutions to ex. Duda One that lets you build responsive websites. My understanding is if i move my current domain name to duda one from networksolutions and build the new site with all the same page names, content,keywords,etc...will it hurt my current page ranking? I see it as having a home on a piece of property where we are knocking down an old house and building a newer nicer house with the same address and family names. Is this the correct thinking or am I not seeing this right?
Thanks
Greg
what if there is a duplicate copy? Have a client who for some reasons have 2 domain names under same content so it is a copy of the second. Now I wonder wether to use 301 redirect or 302 thats because I don't want to pass the bad score of the second domain which has duplicate content to the primary domain. Can you give me a quick fix on it? cheers.
Hi Danny, That you for the chisklist, I have a question though, I am have a live site https://ifixscreens.com, we made a new design on a development server https://igadgetsrepair.center. Now that we are done with the development site, we want to migrate the REAL domain (ifixscreens to gadgetsrepair) to the development server. Will this way affect my seo by any mean, also I changed alot of the inner page URL structure? Do you have any checklist for such a movement? Please advice?
It's actually great article, very helpful. All of these I did but my website is strange, is not getting all it's juice as supposed to. Not sure why.
Is it possible to keep both the URLs i.e the old one and the new one together? Would it harm my website?
This is a verycomrpehensive guide, but as this was written 6 years ago. Would you still say that this is the guide to use?
Also how long should you keep the old domain name running for?
Is this article still what is considered best practice or is there anything more up to date?
I have a blog with a domain name, A.com. A partner and I started a new business with domain name B.com. The business and blog are related and it has always been our intention to merge the two in order to drive traffic to the business. So, we created a subdomain, blog.B.com and I just changed the blog over from A.com to blog.B.com. However, when I got to the part about changing the address with Google, I found out that Google doesn't allow a change of address to a subdomain. Now I'm freaking out!! :-) Should I submit a change of address from A.com to B.com? Or just skip this step and let the 301 redirects and site maps do their job? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much for your information. It gives me a good feeling that not only my website builder knows this information, but I can keep a closer check on the individual steps as well. In the Netherlands, we say knowledge is power, and this is truely the case here. Keep up the good work!
Hi Danny
A long time ago since you publish this guide and I´m very curious to know if something have changed and how was your recent domain move from seomoz.com to just moz.com .
I´m pretty sure you have a lot of thing to tell about changing domains after your experience. Could you share with us please?
How was the move plan?
Did you suffer any lose or where affected somehow?
Recommendations?
Thanks !
Hello! Sadly Danny no longer works at Moz, but our SEO Ruth Burr will be giving a webinar on June 27th to talk about how we did the migration. You can sign up here: https://moz.com/webinars.
Thank you jennita ! i´m in !
Thanks for this list and I found a few more in the comments to add to my checklist. Only thing I would add is a caution that if the domain you are moving from has been penalized by Penguin or Panda or had a manual penalty then 301 redirecting to a new domain won't help any as the old penalty will be redirected to the new domain. Best to either start over with a new domain (and back links, etc.) or fix the old one first.
I have a question appreciate anyone answer me .
when we use 301 redirect , what must to do with old website files ? must we delete the old files and just keep htaceess to redirect addresses or should we keep old site files on the server ?
thank you
Just in a painful process where we moved an entire site from .co.uk to .com. 301'd every page and informed GWT. 6 days later a warning from GWT of "un-natural linking" which we believe this was because of the 10K 301s from old domain to new domain setting of an algorithm trigger. Shortly after hit with a big drop in rankings. In the process of submitting re-consideration request. New site is currently better indexed than the old site.
Anybody else with a similar experience?
I am moving my domain and my developer would like to just use a vhost for the new domain. This is ineffective correct?
Here is the message I received: I just added another vhost, it is much safer than creating an additional version and put in a script to no index no follow on the new domain.
Is this approach safe for my rankings?
Thanks
Can anybody help please - urgently looking for an answer to this.
The powers that be at my company would like to change our domain to simply remove the hyphen: www.name-abc.com to www.nameabc.com. Only .01% of traffic to our site today even search for the non-hyphenated variation, so I see no value to our customers for such a change, especially considering the amount of work involved. Can you shed some insight into the potential consequences of changing your company's domain to help me prove my point?
The problem I had when I moved my old domain to the new domain was complete loss of old rankings. Is that to be expected anyway? I was under the impression (GWM) that when you do exactly what they say, your site should be fine. I 301'd the old to the new in a 1:1 style and yet still lost all of my rankings. I followed everything that you suggest (be it before this even existed) and yet still got droped.
Also, I have a question when it comes to anchor and link juice carrying through 301's....will those BL's show up in Webmaster tools (or site explorer) even though they have the old url's? It is just not possible to go through all of my backlinks and ask the webmasters to change to appropriate url. I managed to find my most valuable backlinks and then reuqest the change, some did, some didn't. What kind of time frame would one expect to see all the rankings come back and bl's be recognized?
In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. Eventually G works out that the 301's are indeed permanent and removes any temporary handbrake - and you will start seeing updates in WMT...but it depends on "all things being equal" - and they just never are...especially if a domain name change is involved too.
Also, as noted in my comment above, check, test, check and test again - MANUALLY - using thing like HTTPfox FF plugins...we picked up a whole bunch of 302's on a site simply because the webmaster didn't check the "permanent" check box in IIS...it's painstaking but on an ecommerce site, you just can't be too careful...there's too much money at stake.
Like you, just to be safe, we pesonally approach the top 10% of links and ask for a change to the URL...about a 75% success rate...but we usually add a little link love from one of our in-house sites to sweeten the edit ;)
sdiggles why don't you open a Google Ranking Account? As far as I know the answers are there.
Another quick note... many of these steps are also essential when doing a site redesign. When the domain stays the same, but the URLs change. Uploading the old sitemap into Google Webmaster Central and letting them follow the 301 redirects to the new URLs will help you immensely!
really useful post, thanks :)
When can you remove old-site.com ?
You will need to keep the 301s in place indefinitely but you could move all of the files off of the server.
What about if you're moving www.domain.com to www.domain.com/subdirectory? Any special tips there, other than what you mentioned?
Also, a related question: Do SEs still have a problem following Javascript redirects, or have they solved that?
Thanks
All of the same steps apply for moving to the search engines. I am not exactly sure how the engines will treat it as I have never done a test specifically on this idea.
With regards to SEs following javascript, the answer is it depends. For the majority of the cases it shouldn't be an issue. That said, javascript can be used in many different ways and the engines can follow them all (not can browsers for that matter)
Thanks for this step by step list. Didn't even know this was possible but I will bookmark thise for future reference as I'm sure I'll need to know this in the near future.
@Danny,
It is interesting that you did not include the use of the Canonical tag in your list. It effectiveness is at times suspect, but it can help in certain situations.
If attempting to move an entire site (copy it), as opposed to redeveloping it in a new domain, I would recommend copying pages and adding Canonical tags to the original domain pointing to the moved content. You can do this 1 page or 1 section at a time. This helps give your new domain some initial traction.
I am interested in any other uses you might have for incorporating the Canonical tag during a move.
Hi James,
If you implement the 301s correctly there will be no content on the old domain to put the canonical tags on.
On a higher level, the canonical tag is very new and since I have not been able to test it thoroughly, I am not recommending its use just yet. That said, I am very doubtful it could cause any harm as it is merely a suggestion to the engines, not a rule.
Dang, yes I like this post! I have to move my oldest and most popular Blog off of Blogger and install it on my own domain using WordPress, and though I set up the new site over a year ago I still have been putting it off for fear of losing all my seven years of Google juice.
This spells out exactly how to do what I have to do and I thank you so much!
Rich
Thanks, might be good to add something about transition speed (ie when you've got 50k+ URLs) and also transitory linkbuilding to help iron out shortcomings .... and perhaps also about the often-accompanying-but-unavoidable temporary dip in traffic.
Thanks for the informative article, Danny.
Why do you advice to create a sitemap for the old domain?
We found it works really well to create a sitemap for the old domain and submit it after the all of the 301 redirects have been implemented. This way, the engines attempt to crawl the old URLs and see that they are 301s much faster than if they would have "naturally" discovered the links.
That is a great tip!
That one tip has really made this post, so much so that everything else you wrote is almost just a bonus. Great thinking.
ooooo....that's an awesome tip. Never thought about doing that, but in retrospect makes perfect sense. bookmarked, printed, and placed in my "important" folder. couldn't have come at a more perfect time for me. Thanks!
Great tip indeed. I'm moving a site this week and I've got your guide printed and ready to go...
Hi Danny,
Very nice information.. I just completed the move of a real estate site with 50,000 active indexed pages and google and have a lot of questions that I would like your opinion on.. but first would like to comment on this perticular comment about running a site map on the old site which has all the pages 301ed. When you lit of the sitemap on the old 301 site did you monitor to see if google rejected or accepted the sitemap, as when you read their rules they say if you feed them a sitemap with any 301s they will reject the sitemap.. I asked in google webmaster forum why? and have not yet received an answer.. but it sound like if it worked for you then what I am saying is not true...I have a couple of questions I would love to have you take a shot at so guess I will add them at the end....
Hi ,
It is really good way... but I have some questions
what about backlinks & age of domain ?
I mean new domain may be can not get good result in google or any other se...
what you think ?
If you follow the steps on this list and 301 all of the pages from the old domain to the new domain you should not see a significant drop in rankings.
We have done this with clients in the past with great success.
Hey, hand me a glass of champagne in the middle of the work-day, and I'll come up with all sorts of ideas. Eventually, one of them will be good ;)
Seriously, this is great - there's a lot of confusion and concern about redirection out there. One thing I'd be curious about, from the SEOmoz perspective, is how long the whole process usually takes to settle down, once it's in motion. I've personally seen that, even if it's done by the books, there's sometimes some SERPs bouncing, anywhere from a couple of days to about a week, which then settles back to normal (if you did it right). Have others observed that as well?
I've seen it take anywhere from a few weeks to a month or two for all the new pages to be indexed, and that in the mean time rankings can disappear completely, before bouncing back in to position.
Of course: that was before the 'Change of Address' form ...
wow, great job, Danny and Dr.Pete.
I've never thought of create a sitemap for the old domain before.
Thanks a lot for the tips
Sweet !
I'm in the process to move domain. Stress relief !
thanks a lot Danny
Hi Danny,
Don't know if you are still monitoring this old thread but you seem to be an expert on the domain move..
Do you have any thoughts on a blanket 301 forward so all the visitors are not lost.. is it possible google could assume you are cloaking... since no matter what url you enter it will go to the index page of my new site. Google has been known more than once to do something like mydomain.com/jdkdkjkweiruwioq.html and if it does not give a 404 then it could be cloaking... and banned...
As we know its basically impossible to do individual 301 to each page when you have thousands and they are not the same name.. or same directory.
Do not use a blanket redirect on all traffic from your old site to the homepage of the new one. Although this will pass search engine ranking value, it will provide a poor user experience for website visitors trying to access specific pages.If there isn’t a corresponding page on the new site, redirect to one with similar content,also update the internal hyperlinks on your website and point them to the new domain locations rather than having them redirect from the old ones. If possible, contact external websites that link into the site and ask them to update their links
Hi Jeniffer,
I know what you mean.. about the blanket... but the average website is 1,000 to 50,000 pages how would you do individual re-directs on a thousand pages plus.. also with a blanket redirect... not sure you are right about passing rank as you are directing all 1,000 page to say the index page and that means you just fed google 1,000 pages of dupe content.... I just moved a 50k page site and you just cannot do 50,000 individual 301 to the exact or similar page but I did as I desinged a program using htaccess and a text file full of thousands of old url matched with new url worked wonderful... for example
old/myreddog.htm:new/myrealreddog.htm
etc and on and on for thousands of one line entries so that when someone visited myreddog.htm on the old site they got a 301 on the fly to the new site at the similar page myrealreddong.htm
Thanks Danny, but i've got 1 question
what is the purpose of this point
--"Create a custom 404 page for old domain which suggests visiting new domain."
Why not just have a 301 redirect
Thanks for this. It saved me a lot of questions.
We are planning to do a relaunch (new content, new design) + a domainname change. Some of my team members think it is best to do the domain change already on the old-version. Whereas I think it would be best to implement the domainchange on the new version because otherwise it can be suspected we did the domainchange only for SEO purposes. What are you guys thinking?
Hi Danny,
I need to know one thing. I want to do 301 permanent redirection of my URL https://www.creativebloggingideas.com/seo-training-in-chandigarh.html to a new domain, and that domain is www.seotraininginchandigarh.com and I want to keep the content same as in the old URL.
If I do 301 permanent redirection and keep the content same on both the pages, will their be a duplicate content issue? Please let me know.
Thanks
Gaganpreet Singh
There will be no duplicate content issue because you already made the 301 redirect of the old page to the new page (same content).
Blast from the past but a great post, I have told my employees to print this one off =)
What about Google Analytics?
When i add a new domain there they tell me to add a different analytics code.
Should i implement the new code or let the old code stay in the template?
Great guide. I'm alot clearer now after reading this. Thanks very much Danny.
Hi,
I have a question. I received a cease notice from a law firm regarding my domain name (apparently the name infringes on their client). All of the content is fine, it's just the domain name so it looks like I'm going to have to take advantage of the checklist.
My question is, should my strategy change because I'm simply moving all of my content from one domain to another? Does this scenario make it better or worse?
I'm beyond concerned about the traffic, ranking, and financial implications from all of this so any feedback will be GREATLY welcomed and appreciated.
Really great post. I found it very useful. I created a similar guide that has a few different ideas as well.
https://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/how-to-change-your-domain-without-the-pain.php
This is a very simple step by step outline. Thank you for providing this. It will become very handy if I decide to move one of my domains. How often do you think people decide to change domain names. (On Average)
Bookmarked as at some point I am sure this will be handy!
Question, we are in the process of moving to a new domain. You mention in your guide to keep the old sitemap in webmaster tools so google will crawl and see they are redirected.
However, I've seen a few recommendations in the google webmaster forum that you should not have any links in your sitemap that rely on redirection.....
Any additional thoughts... or recommendations.
Wow, just realized that with this comment I will have 100 Youmoz points!!! Time flies when you're having fun with SEOmoz.
This is Ideal.
It will take out a lot of the headache from trying to address this problem. All the extra commenets were helpful too!
Thanks eveyone!
Great post, im going to be doing this soon with my store site, so this is a great help!
thanks
pretty straightforward and simple
thanks for the post
Thank you!
Ciao,
Please find a french translation of your post here https://insidedaweb.com/dotclear2/index.php?post/2009/08/07/Guide-SEO-%3A-Comment-correctement-faire-migrer-son-nom-de-domaine .
Thanks for your tips