Moving a website from one domain to another
-
Hi Guys,
I figured I'd investigate this fully before potentially ruining a client's traffic.
The rundown:Two websites; one is an ecommerce store and the other is just a brochure website which has references to the ecommerce store.
The ecommerce store is hosted on a server we control whereas the brochure one isn't, the URL for the brochure store is nice and simple which is the reason for the switch, as the ecommerce URL is very long and hard to remember.
Now from an SEO point of view will it be a case of 301 redirecting every URL from the old domain name to the new one one or is there an easier option?
Any tips or links to more information would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan
-
And don't forget to look into the Change of Address feature in Google Webmasrter Tools:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106
-
short answer: yes
-
I have a similar issue and found this thread - if the previous url has identical content to the new url, does the redirect solve problems that might arise with duplicate content?
-
A recent blog post that should help you
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects.
Your situation should make the move easy enough as the urls will be the same bar the root domain. This can easily be done in htaccess, here is a guide:
http://www.orderofbusiness.net/blog/redirect-old-domain-to-new-domain-via-htaccess/
edit: Andy beat me to the punch
-
Basically a 301 redirect is the best option, if you are literally moving a whole domain and the urls will stay the same (save for the domain name) you can use the below
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>
Thats assuming you are running apache.
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
-
Website is not indexing
Hi All, My website URL is https://thepeopeople.com and it is neither caching nor indexing in Google. Earlier the URL was https://peopeople.com. I have redirected it to https://thepeopeople.com by using 301 redirections. I have checked the redirection and everything else is fine and I have submitted all the URLs in search console also, still the website is not indexing. Its been more than 5 months now. Please suggest a solution for this. Thanks in Advance.
Technical SEO | | ResultfirstGA0 -
Merging Domains
Hi, Everyone, My company is currently working with a client that has multiple websites and is interested in merging them into one. One is a primary corporate site, the other is a site for a single line of products. They obviously want to merge the product site into the corporate site. The interesting thing is that the product site outperforms the corporate site. It has the highest traffic, and it has far more links/linking domains, a higher domain authority (although only by two points), and much more social activity. However, their reasons for wanting to merge the two are completely valid - less management, URL would match print collateral, etc. They're asking our opinion on whether or not to move forward with the merger. I'm leaning toward no simply because of the fact that the site they want to merge is outperforming the other. I'm curious, though, to get some other opinions on this. Would a merger be worth the work in this case? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PapercutInteractive0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will the www. links replace the non-www links when it comes to keyword rankings? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Multiple domains on the same hosting
Hello, I have around 80 sites (different domains) which are on the same host. Everytime I look up the IP of these domains, it gives me the same IP. The sites are interlinked, all linking to the main domain. My question is: Does the off site link building have effect on the 80 sites?
Technical SEO | | Arianittt0 -
Change of domain name?
Hello, We are currently developing a new site for an existing online clothing retailer. The existing site is on a .co.uk domain, however we are targeting a global market and wondered whether we could/should launch the new site under a .com address and whether this would be beneficial? Most of our back links come from Affiliate blogs and we could quite easily change these to the new URL. Thanks Bilal
Technical SEO | | PLP1 -
Two blogs on the same domain
I have had two blogs on the same domain for a while now, and it just occurred to me that no one else seems to do this and maybe it's even weird. http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
http://www.stadriemblems.com/scouting/blog/ One is our main blog, and one is for a very concentrated niche of customers. What are your opinions on this? Everything from SEO to best practices, to overall unusual-ness?0 -
Keyword in Domain or not?
My on page optimization grade is an "A" with the following factors; Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>11 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>5 / 5</dd> </dl> The main thing I appear to be missing is keywords in my URL. How truly important is that in today's SEO world and how much time or ranking would be lost if I do not have control to change the external links to my website if I decided to migrate to a keyword relevant url?
Technical SEO | | classa0 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0