Top 10 SEO Checklists in Moving a Website to a New Domain

Moving an entire website to a new hosted domain can have some downturns. The page relevance of the old site does not pass on to the new one in an instant. As a result, the ranking of the old website is expected to drop while the new domain could start from scratch. Not only that, average daily traffic of the old website may not shift to the new one. These hurting effects could be so disastrous to your business - even though you still have control over the two domains promoting the same products or services.

But working things appropriately could minimize the negative effects of moving from a website domain to another. It is important to have everything in check so search engines could not flag the new one as duplicate (or worse spam). At the same time, loyal visitors will not be confused if the site redirection seems truly legitimate. The following are SEO-friendly checklist could help you figure out the things you need to do in transferring to a new domain:

1. Make a 301 Redirect Map

Moving to a new domain is similar to making a mirror site. It is better to have one-to-one correspondence of every page in the old site to the new one. Using Xenu or GSiteCrawler can help you identify every page in the old site to have a corresponding page in the new domain. To verify if old site’s ranking have been routed to the URL, you can use Web CEO or Rank Checker.

2. Avoid 404 Errors

The most common problem in running a redirection of URL’s from one site to another is 404 errors or page non-existence. Xenu is a useful tool in determining 404 errors in the redirection scheme. Thereby, you can locate those pages with 404 errors and appropriately make a valid URL redirect.

3. Check the Internal Linking Structure of Every Page in the Old Site

Internal links from an old page should have valid redirects to the corresponding page in the new site. You can use Xenu to check for broken links in the internal linking structure of every page in the old site. Then you can use Text Replace to make the necessary changes in the internal linking structure to point to the corresponding pages in the new site.

4. Add a New Domain the Each of your Webmaster Accounts

Presumably, you have a webmaster account for Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the old site. You can add the new domain using the same Webmaster account to associate this domain to the old site. It is also advisable to resubmit you r old site’s sitemap bearing the updated internal links for 301 redirects.

5. Keep the Control Over the Old Site for 4-6 Months

It is crucial to check every now and then if all redirects had been successful. So having full access to the old domain is necessary to make the necessary changes and transfer of page relevance from the old page to the new page. Also, it could take 1-3 months to stabilize the rankings of your contents with their new URL’s in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

6. Gather All External Links.

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing usually have a list of your old site’s external links. Gathering all these links could be helpful in contacting the webmasters of these external links for the updates you’ve made in transferring your contents to a new site.

7. Take Note of the Top Referring Links to Your Old Site

In your old site’s webmaster account, you can determine which sites usually points to your old domain. You can also contact as much as 200-300 webmasters of these sites to update their links to your new hosted domain.

8. Post in the Webmaster Forum

It might also help if you inform officially that you are moving your old site’s contents to the new one. In doing so, search engines might somehow determine that such transfer of contents are valid and legitimate. You can also explain the reason of moving into the new domain.

9. Monitor and Compare Your Two Sites in Terms of Ranking

This is often important especially if your new site’s content is not being crawled or indexed in two weeks while previous pages rankings are dropping. You can then post in the Webmaster Forum about the problem. Usually, it could take at least 3 months for search engines to deliver stable ranking reports for targeted keywords so it is crucial to monitor ranking tweaks within the moving period until official search engine ranking updates.

10. Promote Your Site Using Media and Online Marketing Hubs

You can post an official press release of moving your website to a new domain. While you establish the legitimacy of the new domain as your new official website, you can also build inbound links coming from these press release pages for the contents of your new site. You can also buy for an ad in a particular webpage or blogsite for your target keywords. You can also launch an email marketing campaign side by side with social media promotions in twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. Lastly, update all your contact information using the new site.