Create content (contact information, description of your company, indication of future plans) and something link worthy for the new domain. Work with your support or development team to set up 301 redirects from all of your old pages to your new pages. As you can imagine, if you are not changing your URL structure beyond TLD this step is much easier. In that case you only need to redirect your TLD. For example, I had a client that switched their domain name, and they planned to switch from their current domain to one that was already being used as a vanity domain (It was 301 redirecting to their current domain and had been for years). That’s until the support specialist at their hosting provider dug in and fixed the problem.
It took 15 minutes for the support tech to fix, when it might have taken much longer for my client to hunt down the problem. And that’s if they could find that second redirect at all. In this post, I included 10 commonly overlooked tasks to add to your checklist when migrating to a new domain name. I highly recommend going through those steps in detail if you are planning to change domain names in the near future. The list might just save you some frustration (and your organic search traffic). If you’re purchasing a business, merging with another business, or are simply looking to buy a more relevant domain name, you’re going to want to know what changing your domain name will do to your SEO.
Although changing your domain is simple, it can have a negative effect on your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if you’re not careful. However, domain name changes are sometimes necessary, and for this reason, it’s important to know what happens to your SEO when you change your domain name. This is important because it's the biggest SEO ranking factor and when changing domain names you want to minimize losing any good links. Of course, this doesn’t mean that changing your domain name will erase ALL your SEO progress in all circumstances. Changing your domain name will affect the search engines’ ability to find you and scour your web pages. And it’s a good idea to also keep your older domain name and have it redirect to your new one, to transfer over any existing SEO value that you have.
So, while we know that moving to a new domain directly affects your SEO efforts, the question is how far does it impact your website’s SEO performance or in what ways does it deter its progress. That will tell you how well it’s been indexed by Google and if there were any manual penalty actions taken against your domain (in case it’s been recognized by the Google team has having spam content or engaging in black-hat SEO practices). Here are steps you should take to hold on to all of the SEO benefits you have reaped even after you’ve switched your domain. During a rebrand and domain migration, there are a number of factors to consider, other than the more traditional SEO migration considerations. In situations like these, there IS a way to switch your domain without worrying too much about lost SEO.
