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It’s not uncommon for businesses to need change their website domain and I’ve come across this on many occasions. It could be that the company name is changing due to a takeover or rebrand, a better domain has come up for sale or perhaps even through a legal battle over a domain name. Whatever the reason, there is a right way of going about changing the domain name of a website.
You may think it should just be a matter of uploading the website to the new domain and publicizing the new company name/domain, but there’s much more to it than that, particularly when it comes to the search engines!
Chances are if the old domain has been around for sometime, it’s built up some history and has a reasonable number of links pointing to it. This can all be lost quite easily, so you need to tell the search engines to transfer your links to the new domain. This needs to be done using a ‘301 redirect’ and redirect the old domain to the new domain. That way the search engines will follow any old links to the new site. Google has an explanation about 301 redirects which you can read here.
Make sure you have a 404 error page on the old web pages and redirect visitors to the new domain. A 301 redirect should direct traffic but a 404 page is worth having as a back up too. I’ve written about 404 pages in a previous blog post.
If the structure of the new site is similar to the old site, you can redirect each old page to the equivalent new page via a 301 redirect as well.
Whatever you do, it’s inevitable that rankings will suffer, but these steps are important to minimize the impact! Bear in mind timing as well. If your busy time of year is the run up to Christmas, then avoid any major changes to your website and wait until the new year!
Have you changed your website’s domain? Please let us know why you did it and what the impact was.
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
