How to move to a new domain without hurting SEO

Why move to a new domain?

If the domain you have now is not the one you wanted – if it’s long, with hyphens and says nothing about your brand – then you might consider registering a new web address that’s not only catchier but also more relevant to your brand.

1. Register your new domain

2. Upload a “coming soon” page

Create a ‘coming soon’ page on your new domain a few weeks before moving everything from your old domain to the new one to allow search engines to crawl and index your new website.

3. Upload your pages to the new domain

Now you need to upload all the files from your old website to your new one.

4.  301 Redirect to keep rankings

A search engine friendly 301 Redirect (Moved Permanently) will not only send visitors to the correct page but will also tell search engines that the page has permanently moved. A 301 direct will thus transfer domain authority, visitors and also your rankings in Google, and can be used to consolidate link equity content within a site to provide a better end user experience.

These 301 redirects should be done for individual pages meaning that each page on the old site should be redirected to the new URL on the new domain.

5. Tell Google you moved

Another important thing you need to do is let Google know that your old website has been transferred to a new web address. To do that, you can use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Console. This works at site level, letting Google know that you’ve transferred the entire domain and not just certain pages.

After you’ve moved to a new gTLD, you need to monitor everything to ensure you’ve redirected everything properly so you don’t lose any referring traffic or PageRank that’s coming from old backlinks. Keep checking google webmaster tools for any missed redirect pages.