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
-
Changing URL to a subdomain?
Hi there, I had a website www.footballshirtcollective.com that has been live since July. It contains both content and eCommerce. I am now separating out the content so that; 1. The master domain is www.footballshirtcollective.com (content) pointing to a new site 2. Subdomain is store.footballshirtcollective.com (ecommerce) - pointing to the existing site. What do you advise I can do to minimise the impact on my search? Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjmaxwell0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Subdomain vs totally new domain
Problem: Our organization publish maps for public viewing using google maps. We are currently getting limited value from these links. We need to separate our public and private maps for infrastructure purposes, and are weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of separating by domain or sub domain with regards SEO and infrastructure. Current situation: maps.mycompany.com currently has a page authority of 30 and mycompany.com has a domain authority of 39. We are currently only getting links from 8 maps which are shared via social media whereas most people embed our maps on their website using an iframe which I believe doesn't do us any favour with SEO. We currently have approx 3K public maps. Question: What SEO impact can you see if we move our public maps from the subdomain maps.mycompany.com to mycompanypublicmaps.com? Thanks in advance for your help and happy to give more info if you need it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eSpatial0 -
Interesting Cross Domain Canonical Quirk...
We recently ran cross domain canonicals for 2 of our websites. What's interesting is that when I do a search for ""site:domain1.com "product name"" the Title in the SERPs uses the Domain Name from the site the page has been canonicaled to. So the title for Domain1 (for the search term above) looks like this: Product Name | Keywords | Domain 2 Interesting quirk. Ha anyone else seen this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Change of language
Hi everyone, We bought a domain which had content in German for over 8 years. So the rankings it had were in another search engine aswell. So i've changed the language of the content + targetting in webmaster tools to Dutch. (i've created unique content, in case your wondering)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online_Supply
Now we don't rank in the targetted search engine, nor in the search engine the website was previously ranked. My question is how can we fix this so we are going to get indexed and ranked for the targetted search engine. Thanks in advance.0 -
Subdomain or New Domain or Directory path?
Hi Mozzers, I have a dilemma here. I have one of my clients that has its American website and would like to promote its business in canada(2 locations only vs more than 40 in the u.s). What would be the best SEO decision here for the 2 Canadian locations: should i go for a new root domain? if yes why (www.example.ca) a new subdomain? if yes why (ca.example.com) or just following a directory path solution under the american site? (www.example.com/canadiancity) Thanks Ty
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0