Changing your domain name

What things do you need to consider if you have to change your domain name? In an ideal world the URL of your website will not change but this can’t always be the case particularly if your company has gone through a rebrand.

Whenever you make a substantial change to your website, such as changing the domain name or performing a complete site redesign there will always be an impact to your rankings for a short period of time which could lead to reduced visitors or visibility in the SERPs. So if you are intending on changing your URL a full Search engine optimisation strategy is in place for the changes you will be making to the site.

Here are some things to consider when looking at changing your domain name:

The age of the domain you are changing your URL to – if the domain you will be using on the site is completely new this will have an impact on the rankings of your site as Google will have no history of the domain name.

Make sure that there are 301s from the old website to the new site so that some of the SEO goodness from your old website is transferred over to the new URL. It’s important to remember when doing this that this won’t transfer 100% of the PageRank to the new site. If you are unable to put in place 301 redirects because the old domain name is being used for something else or for another reason then it will take longer for the goodness of your site to recover in the search engines. Google Webmaster Tools allows you to tell them when the URL of your site has changed as well so it’s worth using this tool. To do this you will need to have both sites verified in Google Webmaster Tools.

An interesting example we recently had was a site which could not be 301 redirected but instead had a 302 in place but when the new site was indexed Toolbar PageRank was transferred and rankings were for the most part retained with only a small drop in traffic as the site owners used Google Webmaster Tools to inform Google of the change to their URL.  We don’t recommend using a 302 redirect if you have to change your domain name but this certainly shows that the Google Webmaster Tools method of informing Google of the change to your domain name is an important part of the process.

Make sure that the look and feel of your website, including the content on the site is not changed too much at the same time as the URL change as this can also impact on the site rankings in Google and the other engines. Ideally presenting Google with the new URL with a 301 from the Old URL and the same layout and content of the old site will help Google see that this is the same site and not a new one.

Making sure that your website has a content marketing strategy will also help your site recover better as this can be set to automatically ping Google when new content is posted, can be registered as a Google News provider.