Changing domain and transferring SEO power to new.

[green.h]

hi,

i have a website with some pages index in google on first page. i want to change the domain name but also want to keep the old domain.  How can i transfer the index pages SEO power to new domains pages? So the new domain page can appear instead of old domain.   301 redirect will permanently redirect the user to new domain but i want to keep the old domain running for users only, not for Search engines. any idea. please share. thanks.

[JonoAlderson]

Hello!

Interesting question. I'd like to probe a little, but let's tackle the easy stuff first...

You can use a canonical URL tag in the header of each of your pages to reference which version you'd like Google to consider the 'correct' version of a page.

For example, on www.domain1.com/page/, you can set a canonical URL tag of www.domain2.com/page/. This acts as a 'strong hint' to Google that you consider these pages to be equivalent, and that you'd like the www.domain2.com version to inherit all of the signals from the www.domain1.com example.

This isn't a perfect solution, mind you. If you still have lots of links (internal or external), equity, coverage or other forms of attention pointing at the www.domain1.com example, this page might still have some of the authority and signals. You're essentially asking Google nicely to move the value, and hoping that they agree that that's OK / the right decision.

From a technical perspective, I'm assuming that your setup will involve serving a single site from both domains, and in which case, the content/tech/templates/URLs are the same, apart from the domain. Assuming that this is the case, you need to make sure that every page is a one-to-one, like-for-like match. You shouldn't point everything at the homepage, for example, and you should also make sure that things like category pages, listings, and other templated or procedurally generated pages also use canonical tagging.

If your tech setup is more complex than this, you'll need to do some thinking on how you 'map' canonical tags between the various versions of your pages and content - something which might require some planning and further investigation.

As an additional consideration, there's no guarantee that the www.domain1.com won't show up in search results if people search for it directly, or if that version of the page has disproportionately high amounts of authority (as I outlined above). And whilst you could use meta robots noindex tags on the www.domain1.com pages _and _canonical tags, there are mixed schools of thoughts on whether this is safe - it may be that Google interprets this as an instruction to inherit the noindex attribute on the www.domain2.com example.

As for your particular scenario, I'd be interested in understanding why you want to maintain the original/current version of the website 'for users'. If I can understand a bit more about the business requirements and what success looks like, it may be that I can refine your options a bit.

I note that some of the other answers have referenced domain forwarding/masking, and 301 redirects. I'd be hesitant to do anything with either, without a better understanding of your setup. Conditional and user-based 301 redirects can be risky if not implemented very carefully (and don't solve for your canonical / equity challenge), and domain forwarding is rarely an SEO-friendly solution (you're just making your website available from more/other domains).

Hopefully this is helpful; it'd be great to dig deeper.

[Yellow2000]

Hi. You stated you did not care about SEO results but instead you want to maintain easy navigation and keeping your existing customers happy and with as little change as possible.I believe this is what you expressed above. If this is exactly what you mean then ,I would suggest not using a normal redirect permanent 301 redirect procedure. Instead you will need to go into your domain account ,If it is GoDaddy etc. When you begin the redirect procedure you will see the word MASKING. What Masking does for a redirect is it allows you to forward your current customer base to the new domain but the new website domain will be Masked with your original  domain information including Title and Description of your choice during the Forwarding WITH masking procedure.You will have the option to enter this information.Simply use your original title and description during this . As for SEO issues there will be issues from this procedure. Unless the Page URLS are almost identical along with titles and descriptions as well as content, Then you probably will not recover your rankings ,But if you are not yet getting a ton of traffic then its still early enough to  begin your SEO all over again and do your best to recover as much link juice as possible.

[donsilvernail]

Hi Green.h,

If you are keeping the old website, what you want to do is tricky. To pass link juice to the new domain you need to 301 redirect the URLS. This is how google knows that the website has changed domains and that it should rank the new urls in place of the old. If you do not do a 301 redirect and keep the old site live, you basically have 2 websites. One website with ranking and a new website that you will now need to begin an SEO campaign.

[SergioB1717]

This link i think will help you

https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-to-change-domain-names-keep-your-rankings-in-google/