Can i migrate to a new domain without losing rankings?

[Direct_Ram]

we are looking at migrating to a new domain name, but worried about current rankings.. can we do this and keep our rankings if we 301? if we can expect a dip, how long will that generally take?

thanks

[Direct_Ram]

thanks appreciate for your help,

thanks

[antonioaraya]

Hey:

Migrating a site to a brand new domain after doing all the things to do doesn't guarantee you will keep all your rankings, but if the change is mandatory, and assuming you site will be the same (just a domain change) I suggest to:

• As you said, make sure you are doing a cross domain 301 redirect, so if someone is trying to request http://olddomain.com/fake-page-123 the user should be redirected to http://newdomain.com/fake-page-123. Usually you can do this in Apache servers modifying the .htaccess with this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• Make sure validate both domains in Google Search Console (and if in your market it's relevant, Bing Webmaster Tools) before migrate. After migrate, make a Change of Address Request from olddomain.com to newdomain.com

• As usual, make sure your sitemap.xml it's up to date in the new domain and try to block all the innecesary pages on robots.txt to avoid spend your crawl budget (just if neccessary, in large site it's more common). Send them to Google through Google Search Console as soon as your site is migrated.

• Optional: Before migration, would be great to check any 404 errors on the new site to address them when you migrate your site, I suggest to use:

• Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (Crawl Errors)

• Screaming Frog search from broken links

• Open Site Explorer from Moz (Top Pages) and if necesary in large sites, Majestic.com

• Logs files

• Google Analytics history (page views)

• After gathering all this data, make sure the URLs are returning 404 with Screaming Frog, List Mode

Let me know if this is helpful for you.

[MattAntonino]

This is a duplicate question - you have about 4-5 of almost the same question on the forum. Please don't cross-post or re-post. Almost every post on the forum gets at least a couple answers to please hold on and let us work our way there.

Thanks!

[Toddfoster]

Hello,

As with any 301 redirect, you can expect to lose some part of your ranking potential provided by your link profile. Assuming you conduct your 301 correctly (each page being forwarded to a relevant, equivalent page), you will not lose out on any on-site ranking potential.

Numbers range in terms of how much you stand to lose from your link profile's ranking potential. From my research, the number sits somewhere between 1% and 10% - I always use 5% as an estimate.

Long story short, you will lose some ranking potential, although this may not be enough to lose actual rankings, depending on the strength of your website compared to your competition. You can expect to see a small dip, and it will be permanent if you do not conduct any continuing SEO. However, based on your question, I believe you are conducting regular SEO on your website, so these ranking dips should be temporary.

You can avoid this by attempting to push all links currently on your website to your new domain and regain some of this lost "link juice". I would also suggest pushing all links towards your new domain name moving forward to maximize your link profile ranking potential (obviously).

Hope this answers your question!

Best regards,

Rob