Often move your site to a new domain is not a choice, but a business need. Your business can be rebranding, consolidation, or you have purchased a better field.
This process of domain name change ma Digital Marketing Agency in Bournemouth y seem like a challenge, but it should not be. An important takeaway mentioning at first, but you should not lose sight of your SEO goals and strategies.
Digital Ethos, a highly experienced digital marketing agency, have displaced countless websites in new areas. These redirects are successful, because they were made correctly. The good news is we were able to preserve the ranking of keywords and domain authority correctly using 301 redirects and Google Webmaster Tools.
Read Also:- Top 10 SEO Keyword Research Tools for marketers
In this blog, our Consultants Digital Marketing created a guide that walks you through the process of changing domains without having a negative impact on SEO.
Changing your domain
To facilitate this guide, we will assume you just want to change your field and keep your same site architecture (site map, URL, etc.).
As Google recommends, if you change the fields and the launch of a new website, you should do it in two phases. Change the field first, then update the website once the domain change is settled.
Step 1 – Preparation and research
Overall, the domain name change process can take less than an hour if you’re ready. Before you begin, you should have the following things ready and in place:
Either a full working version of the same site, located on the NEW name field on its own hosting environment (either with robots.txt and / or temporarily Meta Tags in place to block search engines until you 301’d).
Or, the ability to quickly change the domain of your site hosted via your hosting panel and (if necessary) the database references in the field.
Each of the above options are fine, but you must ensure that you can always accommodate both areas after the launch of the site on the new domain. Your old domain will host a small “.htaccess” to ensure redirects passed on the new domain.
Both areas must be accessible verifiedand your Google accounts and tools.
If you use Google Analytics, make sure that you have sufficient permissions to modify the domain settings for the profile of your website.
Back-up your website and database (s).
Step 2 – 301 redirect (s)
To preserve and maintain both traffic and back-link portfolio of the former estate, it is important to 301 redirect all your individual URL to the new field. The simplest and most effective way this is via a .htaccess file in your site. If you look at the diagram below, this illustrates how you can host a single .htaccess file on your old domain that redirects all requests on their counterpart to the new domain:
301 Redirect Guide
It is important to note that these steps assume you change one area and therefore your Sitemap and individual URL will not change. My diagram above, you can see how individual applications for specific specifications can be directly adjusted and redirected to the same page at the new domain.
By adding this code to your old .htaccess file hosted domain, you’re basically saying if someone accesses a URL that is not using the new), then redirect to the same URL, but under the new domain. Therefore, no matter how many pages your site has, the lines above 2 .htaccess will work for all your pages. However, if your Digital Marketing Company Bournemouth URL has changed too, you’ll need to redirect each page individually on the .htaccess file like this.
