Will Change Domain Name Effect Search Engine Rank
Sometimes, you may encounter such problem you have to get a new domain name for your website, while you’re worrying about losing the current rank in Google or other search engines. For example, you want to change your current hostease.com domain into a simpler and more catchy one such as host.com. However, the hostease.com has already established in Google and other search engines and even ranks high. Therefore, you may worry about if the rank of your website will drop after the domain name is changing.
Well, of course it will affect Google and other search engines rank. But if you can do it as follows, it will be the best way for you to keep the original rank of your site.
To relocate the site, you’d better follow these steps:
1.First of all, test the contents of the migration process of the entire site by moving a directory or sub domain. Then use the 301 redirect feature to redirect the original site to your new website. This method can be adopted by the search engines: your site has been permanently relocated.
2.Check whether your new site’s pages can appear in the search engine’s search results or not. If you are satisfied on the small-scale migration, you can move the entire site. Please do not redirect all the traffic of the old site pages to your new home page. Although this across-the-board redirection will avoid a 404 error, it can not provide a good user experience. Although the page-to-page redirect (each page of the old site are redirected to the corresponding page of the new site) will bring about a greater workload, but will also give you a more consistent user experience and clarity. If the web pages of the new site cannot exactly match the old one, we must at least ensure that each page of the old site should be redirected to a page with similar content on the new site.
3.If the domain name is changed because of website renaming or redesign, the migration can be divided into two phases: the first stage, move your web site; the second phase, start re-design. In doing so, you could not only control the user experience at every stage of the change in migration, but also make the entire process more smoothly. Change control to a minimum allows you to more easily identify and solve a variety of unforeseen circumstances.
4.Check your site’s internal and external links. Ideally you should contact each administrator of other sites which are linked to your site, so that they can link them to the corresponding page under your new domain name. You should also check and update all the internal links of your old site, so that they point to the new domain name. When you have the site ready for the new server, you can use a link checking tool to verify whether your new site links are all available. This is particularly important, if your original content included absolute links rather than relative links words.
5.In order to prevent confusion and chaos, you’d better continue to hold authority control of the domain name to the original website at least 180 days.
6.Add your new web site to the Webmaster Tools account and verify your ownership of the site. Create and submit a sitemap to show all the new web site URL, so that search engines will know your new site’s content is now available for crawl.
7.Finally, ensure that your new and old sites in the webmaster tools are verified, and check crawl errors regularly to ensure that the 301 redirect from the old site is working, at the same time the new site will not show the 404 error that we do not want to see.
