Moving Your Site to another Domain
It happens all the time. Companies move their website to another domain whether it is because they got bought by another company, or like soccerloco, they went through a re-branding and that is something they had to do.
If you have to do that, there are things you can do in order to minimize your search engine loss, although I guarantee that you will lose some traffic the first few months for certain. Below are some of the things that must be done:
- Collect list of current URLs and map them to destination URLs using a 301 redirect. Make sure all redirects are 301 which tells search engines this is a permanent redirect.
- Scan your site for all the citation of old website name links to it. Make sure all internal links are linking to the new site.
- Upload new xml sitemap to Google webmaster tool after move
- Ping Google and Bing about the change via their webmaster tools
- Watch the webmaster tools for possible crawler errors
- Submit press release and engage in building new links to the new site
Above are some of the basic things that you must do when moving your website or redesigning your website. Lack of following those steps, can hurt your SEO like it did for an auto software company when they moved their website from another domain to the new domain, and resulted in months of lost search traffic.
