Moving From Old Domain To New Domain – SEO Considerations

Though it is not a common occurrence with every business, there are many situations whereby a company is required to move from an old domain to a new domain. One of the examples is consolidation of multiple websites to a single corporate website. However, when you are moving from an old domain to a new domain for whatever reasons you should make sure that you do not lose the traffic that you have been getting to your old website or to your old domain just because you have shifted your domain. If you are not careful here, you could easily lose the traffic and all the work that you had done to promote your old website will go wasted. The point that we are trying to make here is that you do not have to lose anything and you can carry forward the benefits of your hard work to your new domain as long as you know how to do things correctly.

The first consideration is the transition of your active website to a parked domain. If you have parked a domain for a long time and if you want to move your old website to this parked domain then Google is going to take some time to update its own database and to transfer the benefits. If you are contemplating of moving your old website to this new parked domain then it is best to initiate the process well in advance by posting some relevant content in your parked domain and let it not just be a parked domain but a website with some content. It need not be a massive website; it can be just a single page indicating that this is going to be your new destination. Google uses certain classifiers that tell the search engine that certain websites are just parked pages and they do not have to be listed in the search results. There are millions of such pages and if you are planning to move your old site to one of your parked sites then plan ahead and give Google adequate time for the transition. This simply means that you should not drastically move the content from your old site to the new site all at once but do it in a phased manner so that there is no damage caused to your website’s traffic or ranking.

It is best to start with websites that receive least traffic in case you are consolidating multiple websites to a single new corporate website. This will ensure that your important site is still working for you bringing you the regular traffic. This way you can test the process yet limit the possible damages. When you are moving your site from an old domain to a new domain make sure to use 301 redirects which tells the search engines that the page or the website has been permanently moved to the new location. If you think all these things are too complicated for you, you can work with a web design or web development company that has good SEO understanding to make the shift.

admin