Change is inevitable, especially in the world of e-commerce. And one common change e-commerce merchants know is changing domains. Some changes are good but this is one change that can hurt an online business’ search engine optimization efforts, whether knowingly or unknowingly. A sudden domain change can affect your search engine rankings because major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use metrics on the domain level as well as on the page level to determine search rankings. A domain change resets your domain metrics to zero. However, this does not mean that you cannot move your domain at all. There is a proper way to do it, without damaging your existing search engine optimization marketing efforts. Danny Dover of the SEOmoz blog shares some tips on how to properly move domains.
So, you want to redirect all pages from your old domain to an entirely new one. Here are Dover’s expert tips.
1. Create a sitemap for your old domain. You can do this online with a sitemap generator.
2. Start creating content for the new domain. Start with the basics such as contact details, company information and a brief explanation of the direction that your company is going to. Dover suggests starting early on the linkbuilding.
3. When the new domain is ready, make it live.
4. Using Google Webmaster Tools, register and verify both your old domain and your new domain.
5. Create a custom 404 page for the old domain so visitors will know your new address.
6. Test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain. “301 redirect” the old to the new.
7. Submit your old sitemap to Google and Bing. You will find the submission pages within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center. As Dover explained in his blog post, this will make the search engines “crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirect and change their index accordingly.”
8. Back in Google Webmaster Tools, fill out a change of address form.
9. Make a new sitemap and submit it to the search engines.
10. Wait for Google Webmaster Tools to update and fix any errors in the Diagnostics section.
11. Finally, make sure to monitor search engine results so you’ll know if your new domain is being properly indexed.
Dover adds that as an added search engine optimization marketing measure, your webmaster should maintain control of the old domain so that the 301 redirects stay valid.
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