Change of domain procedure
-
Hi Guys,
I have been tasked with conducting a change of domain for our company website. The website will be exactly the same, just change from www.jamesburfield.co.uk to www.burfieldcreative.co.uk.
This was attempted before but my boss got cold feet and switched back after he saw a drop in rankings. (He put in the redirects and went through the change of domain procedure with google).
I have told him that I think its possible with minimal disruption and we have agreed even with some disruption it will better in the long run for the company.
Here is the process I intend to follow:
1. Copy and upload site to new domain
2. Redirect all pages with a wildcard or individually - possibly drop the www also
3. Follow the change of domain procedure in webmaster tools
4. Change the href of as many as possible back links to point at the new domain
Please let me know your thoughts on my plan and if there is anything else I can do to ensure we maintain our rankings.
Any help is appreciated as this is my suggestion and my neck is on the line!
Thanks guys!
Gareth
-
We have made the change!
http://burfieldcreative.co.uk/
We have put the redirects in place and carried out the domain change procedure with google. If anybody can check everything is in order that would be most appreciated.
Thanks for all your advice.
-
make sure your 301s are in place.
use seomoz crawler as well as google
search site:domain.com and see if any of the pages shouldn't be coming up or if 404s are there
use linksleuth (pc) to look at all the links in your site
make sure you dont change too much on the new site and keep it as close to the old as possible
keep title tags, content and number of links on pages as close to the old as possible - if not the same.
keep coming back to the forum with new questions.
-
Hi Gareth,
There is a very good article about this @Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
You can check that.
I hope it will help,
Istvan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
Has there been an algorithm change in the last week?
Hi guys, Rankings for almost half of our targeted keywords have gone down this week vs. last week. I have checked a couple of rank trackers and all are reporting some serious movement in Google's algorithms during this period. Does anyone have any further information on this that can help me restore our rankings? I haven't read anything in regards to any 'major' pending updates. Many thanks in advance, Jack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jack_Jahan0 -
Change domain.com to www.domain.com - influence on linkbuilding, seo, etc.
Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reyzer0 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Purchasing an existing domain + redirecting to company's domain
Let's pretend that competitor.com ranks well for certain search terms and generates some traffic from organic search. If a company were to acquire the competitor (or their domain), what's the smartest way to redirect that SEO value to the acquiring company's website? Does a 301 redirect work between different root domains? Even if it does work, is that the smartest approach? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raleigh0 -
Hyphen domain effect SEO?
Hi Guys, I am looking to buy some domain that have the keyword I want in - but my question is; Does using hypehns in a domain effect your SEO? Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Could Sub domains damage our SEO?
Hi there, We're currently looking into integrating a new internal search function to our site which will involve housing the search results on a sub domain of our site. We have no intention of these search result pages becoming landing pages for organic traffic but would the inclusion of a sub domain affect the optimization of the main domain? i.e. could it effect our authority? Nige
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NigelJ0 -
Consolidating 3 regional domains
We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us. This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain. The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains. We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based. So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach. One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules. Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually? Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible? In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3? Is this a good strategy? What's the best 301 approach? Any other advice? Thanks J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solas0