SEO Tutorial: Properly Changing Your Domain Name

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You have a running website and it has been running for quite a while now and everything looks good on it. You are getting indexed and you are happy with your rankings. But now you decided that it’s time to change your domain name. If you want to be SEO friendly, you have to make sure your domain name change is executed properly.

Changing your domain name can greatly affect your rankings and index on search engines. This tutorial will show you how to drastically decrease, and in some cases completely negate, the impact of a domain name change on your search rankings.

XML Sitemap

Well first things first, start by creating a sitemap for your old website and submit it on the Google Webmaster Tools, this will ensure that search engines know all the pages on your website and index them. When they will revisit these old pages they will see 301 redirects pointing to your new domain (which is setup later in this tutorial).

Once your new website is up, create a sitemap for that one too and submit it on the new domain profile in the Google Webmaster Tools. It will help search engines find your new pages on the new domain.

You can use XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap for your websites.

A Bit Of Content

Even though your new website might not be ready to be on the internet, you should still create an information page that people can get if they land on your new website. It shouldn’t be anything to fancy, your contact information and a few words on your company’s description (what you sell, promote, etc.). Your “coming soon” page should be very attractive and intriguing so they’ll come back to see what it is once it is up and running. This will also help you get indexed as early as possible.

The best solution would be to have the entire new website ready at the moment of the change. That way, you can be sure all the old content will also be in your new content on the new website.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools

Setup your Google Webmaster Tools for both the old and the new domain. This will help you keep track of everything that is happening on both your old and new domain. Another thing to do in your Google Webmaster Tool is to tell the search engine that your website has moved.

You can do so by using the “Change of Address” tool under site configuration. By doing this, your new URL will be shown whenever you show up in SERPs. It will stay this way for 180 days, by then, Google will have already crawled and indexed your new URL. Obviously you should always check your updates and fix any errors it finds.

301 Redirect

Before launching your new website, gather up all of the existing pages of your old website. Once that is done, 301 redirect them to the new domain name and test them to make sure they work properly. Using a 301 redirect will help transfer the domain authority and page rank of your old domain to your new domain. Now if you want to start using your old domain for something else, you will have to wait a bit before being able to use that domain again. Give enough time to the Google bot to come crawl your new website. Here is a video by Matt Cutts explaining this issue.

Here is the code to 301 redirect your old website to the new one:

Update Your Inbound Links

In order to find where most of your inbound links are, use the Open Site Explorer by SEOMoz or MajesticSEO. Once that is done, try modifying the backlinks you have access to and make them point to the new domain name. This job can be very time consuming, however it is a must in order to quickly rebuild and transfer the weight and authority to the new domain name.

New Inbound Links

You should always work on getting new inbound links. It is essential to start link building to the new domain early enough in order to build the new domain’s weight. Since you just launched a new website, a press release should be made to announce the launch of your website. Write every new feature that is on the new website. Create new social networking accounts for the new domain with Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Blog about your new website and its features. Talk about it in relevant forums as well. Send an email to your mailing list subscribers announcing them the launch of your new website.