Advices on how to change the domain name without losing its referencing

During a rebranding for marketing purposes, in the context of a merger or an acquisition for example, a company can change its website’s domain name.

At the search engines’ level, it is all the pages that change, as if this was a brand new website. Therefore, how not to lose the work done on the SEO and make a successful transition, in particular if the website is old?

In the case of a rather old website with an optimal referencing on the existing domain name, transferring a website on a new name can ruin the time-consuming work that is the SEO. If the decrease of the traffic from organic search is normal (and temporary), some advises can help lessen the downturn, at least during the transition period.

Copy identically your website and implement 301 redirections

The first tip is to completely keep the
website’s architecture, so that only the domain name changes in the URL.

Then, permanent redirections (301 redirections)
must be created from each pages of the former website towards the corresponding
page of the new website. Do not implement multiple redirections.

This process must be closely monitored to
ensure that each 301 redirection is effective. The search engines will know
that it’s not necessary to index the former name anymore but it’s the new one
that must be indexed now. To ensure this, it is necessary to check that none of
the former pages is accessible through the former domain name.

Have the backlinks updated

Google uses parameters linked to confidence
indicators in its algorithm, thus to trusted websites, deemed as such by the
search engine (indicators like the age of the website, the transparency of the
legal notices, the ratio links number/words number per page, the links number
pointing from other websites to this one, the extensions like .edu, .gov, the
institutional websites, media websites, etc.) Hence, it can be interesting to
quickly obtain the links from this kind of trusted websites at the time of the
migration.

Along the same lines, reviewing your backlinks
and requesting to the websites that refer to your website to update these
links, so they link towards the new name, is an advantage. Of course, if you
have many backlinks, concentrate on the more important backlinks regarding the
referencing.

Inform Google

Lastly, it’s possible to directly inform Google
of the changing through Google Search Console, the search engine will then
update its index.

Register the sitemap

By submitting a sitemap file for the new website to the search engines, you will gain time in referencing by immediately giving to the engines the pages to index.

Keep the same holder for the new domain name

Make sure that the new domain name has the same
proprietary information on its whois as the former domain name. Google may
check these data.

Be patient

Do note that on Bing you will need an average of 2 months to get your referencing back, and about 6 to 7 months on Google.

First published at nameshield blog