Web Your NameŽ - Changing your name.
Change your domain.
Move and relocate a website location.
Relocate a website, how to move a website, redirect, redirecting a website, while continuing to maintain my ranking on Google.
This is to permanently move a website. Visit this link if you are interested in how to relocate or move a website temporarily. I made a huge mistake a few months ago. I bought a website from a competitor who had the website setup as a wordpress blog. The blog format was not condusive of the type of industry he was in. I created the new static website and created new pages and moved the content. I deleted the blog and rolled out the new format. I knew this was going to result in a lot of 404 (File Not Found) errors on Google because of the pages being totalled relocated. My advice is to follow Google's roadmap for moving a site. Google lays out the step by step "Google Official" way to relocate a website to a new domain name. I tried to forward my pages through my .htaccess file, but my .htaccess file was on overload and was causing nothing to work correctly.
If you are planning on moving your website to a new domain, the following tips that will help you maintain your website's ranking in Google result pages. Your goal is to not mke the same mistake I made and avoid 404 errors when users click on links in the result pages to get to your website.
- Maybe you are changing your domain name because of a rebrand or redesign of your site, or because you found better keywords to use in the domain name. First, you should do this in two phases: the first phase is to move your site; and the second phase to launch the redesign. By doing it in two phases, it manages the amount of change your users see during the process, thus making the process smoother.
- Create a 301 redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your previous website to your new website. Doing this lets Google, and other search engines know your site has permanently moved. Google recommends testing to make sure that your redirects are working before doing all of them.
Do NOT create a single redirect for all traffic from your old site to your new homepage.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that users make when changing a website's location. I have made it a few times in the past, and I won't make it again. I actually stumbled upon this information in Google Webmaster Tools. I am in the process of moving a domain because I found better keywords to use.
It is more work and takes more time, but a page-to-page redirect will preserve your site's ranking in Google, therefore making it worth every extra second. Using the .htaccess file is the easiest way to accomplish this.
If there won't be an equal match between the old pages and new pages, you should redirect each page on your old website to a similar page on the new site..
- Again, testing will pay ten fold later. After moving the content, you should check your internal and external links, as well as make sure you let other webmasters know to update any links that they have that may have changed. Once your content has been relocated, use a link checker like Xenu or Google's webmaster tools, to confirm there are no broken links within your site.
- Google also suggests to keep the old domain for about 6 months.
- Make sure you use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google about the relocation.
- Add the new site location to your Webmaster Tools account.
- Google also recommends that you create and submit a Sitemap.
Now, Google does not officially state that this will allow you to maintain your PageRank, but by them stating you will maintain your ranking, we can assume that this will allow you to maintain most of your PageRank as well. It has been publicly stated that using 301 redirects will cause a fraction of PR to be lost.
After you have done everything outlined above, it never hurts to visit your Google Webmaster Tools data to make sure there is nothing not working. Obviously, it can take time for all of these changes to take effect. Don't forget to check your awstats to check for 404 errors for the newsite as well.