My client wants to change domain name... Redirect help!
-
Hello,
I have a client who wants to change domain names. The site is designed using WordPress, there are many plugins that will redirect links but they have to be same domain links. When I change the domain I would like to redirect all the old links to the same pages on the new url. How do I accomplish this? The plugin redirection or Yoast will not allow a redirect from one domain to another.
Thanks for any help on this matter. I have 200+ Urls to redirect.
-
As long as the ONLY thing you're changing is the domain name (e.g. all URLS within WordPress will remain identical) the redirect process can be accomplished with a single rewrite rule in your site's htaccess file. There's no reason to write (or bog down your system with) a redirect for each individual page URL.
The configuration of this redirect will depend on whether the primary URL uses the www prefix or not, and whether it uses https.
In addition to the rewrite rule, you need to verify the new domain in Google Search Console (and transfer any preexisting disavow file to it if one existed for the old domain) as well as using the change of address tool to further inform Google of the change.
To help speed up the indexing of the new domain, it can be helpful to leave the old xml sitemap in place for a week or two so that search engines can more quickly discover the redirects. It's also beneficial to try to get at least some of the most powerful existing incoming links from other sites updated to point to the new domain. This takes direct outreach to the other site owners with the request, but it can help rescue some of the slight loss of ranking authority lost through the redirect, and is another good signal to Google of the change.
Finally, be sure you've updated the domain name in your Google Analytics account as well.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Hi Donald
If you're going to be doing this yourself, I'd read up on all the links posted by Andy and preferably find more on how to change domain names. If you don't do it properly your clients site can take a huge hit in visibility. You don't want that - trust me.
What I'd do is make a spreadsheet of every single URL on the old site and what that URL will be called on the new site. If you keep the site & URL structure the same, this should be fairly straightforward. But once you have your list, you should add them to your .htaccess to make sure you do a one-to-one redirect. That way the individual URLs should keep most of their juice and you minimize the losses.
But just be sure you know exactly what you're doing - otherwise it can hurt a lot more than it should.
-
Yes..it is domain level redirect you can achieve this through htacess file.
-
No, you need to redirect all URLs...
Have a read of this on using the change of address tool in Google.
- Set up server-side redirects (301-redirect directives) from your old URLs to the new ones. The Change of address tool won't function without it.
-Andy
-
Hi Ikkie,
do you mean a domain level redirect? such as hgt.com redirected to hgtnow.com and not worry about redirecting each link from their hgt.com/1 to their hgtnow.com/1 counterpart?
-
Hi Donald,
The very best starting point is by reading the Google guides on moving a site.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
I don't actually know about plugins for Wordpress that will do this but your solution is going to lie around making the required changes in your .htaccess file. There is a lot of information out there on how best to do this, but this is what you need to be looking at.
-Andy
-
Hi
Just simply use 301 redirect to your new domain; this will bring you not only the traffic of your existing site as well as the backlinks and juice of those back links to your site.
I believe, this will behave in the same manner with plugins based links as well.Just make sure you follow the guidelines and you do it properly.
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
-
Incomplete Redirect for Domain Migration?
One year ago we migrated domain "X" to domain "Y". We did the proper redirects and used Google Search Console. Everything was done by the book. Now when we enter "Site: X" in Google about 650 results listing the old domain still come up. When clicked these redirect to the new domain. My SEO says that the old domain should not be indexed by Google, that these pages with the old domain should not appear. Is this in fact an incomplete domain migration? Our search traffic dropped considerably when we migrated the domain a year ago. My SEO thinks this may explain the drop. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
The Consequences & Best Practices In Changing Domains
Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name. Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates, new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to? Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
If you do 302 redirect then change to 301 redirect do you lose all link juice?
Hello everyone, I was wondering if you could help me with understanding the following story: A website has been moved from its HTTP version to a HTTPS version. The SEO manager has advised developers that they needed to do 301 redirects. However, in the end, 302 redirects have been put in place instead. Now, 301s should be put in place ASAP. The million dollar question is: has the website lost all of its link juice already given the nature of the redirects? Also, does it depend on whether Google has indexed the new 302 pages or does it depend on something else? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingGH0 -
Domain remains the same IP address is changing on same server only last 3 digits changing. Will this effect rankings
Dear All, We have taken and a product called webacelator from our hosting UKfast and our ip address is changing. UKFasts asked to point DNS to different IP in order to route the traffic through webacelator, which will enhance browsing speed. I am concerned, will this change effect our rankings. Your responses highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
Redirect domain or keep separate domains in each country?
Hi all Hoping this might be something that can be answered given the number of variables 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
My main site is www.isacleanse.com.au (Obviously targeted to Australian Market) and also www.isacleanse.co.nz targeted to NZ. The main Keywords im targeting are 'Isagenix' for both and also Isagenix Australia, Isagenix Perth, Sydney (Australian cities) and Isagenix NZ, Isagenix New Zealand, Isagenix Auckland etc.. for NZ The Australian site gets a lot more traffic and Australian market gets a lot more searches - I also have a section www.isacleanse.com.au/isagenix-new-zealand/ on the Australian site. The question is am I best off redirrecting the .co.nz domain completley to the Australian Domain to give it extra SEO Juice?0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0