Business changing domain name - How to preserve search engine ranking?

Draeger · 26 Jun 2014 at 19:16

I designed and developed a website for a friends business a couple of years ago. With a bit of careful SEO, lots of work and tweaking he is now sitting on page 1 of Google, Yahoo, Bing etc as the first listing for the keywords and phrases required. This has resulted in a huge boost to his business and he's grateful for my work. Fast forward to this point in time, he wants to change domain names as the second part of the current TLD is an area he no longer wishes to provide a service for. I'd rather not post a link to the actual website at this point so I'll describe what I mean. Say his business was one which provides building and decorating services (its not even remotely anything of this nature!

) and his domain name was www.jbbuildersanddecorators.co.uk. He now wants to concentrate purely on building services and therefore wants to drop the reference to decorating. He gets me to register www.jbbuilders.co.uk.

I'm aware of using htaccess to apply a 301 redirect to redirect from his current website to the new domain, is there anything else I should be looking at additionally to that in order to preserve the ranking in search engines he has obtained over the past few years? Not sure if it has any bearing on things but as well as the new TLD he want's a complete redesign of the site to reflect the changes in the area he will be concentrating on. So it wont be just a straight move of the old website data to the new domain.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance/suggestions. :cool:

gord · 26 Jun 2014 at 23:10

So 301ing is the right way to go for a permanent move. But how fine grain you go is determined by what pages are ranking well now and how well the new pages match the old.

If it's just the homepage which is bringing in all the organic traffic then that's your main worry and 301ing that was is always going to be priority. But if you have long tail strings you've optimised for which are hitting sub-pages you'll want to make sure the redirects are accurate for those too, not just a blanket 301 for the domain.

That said, Google won't blindly follow the 301 into the night. The new pages will be re-evaluated so if you're enjoying good rankings now don't deviate too far from your key data.

Draeger · 27 Jun 2014 at 08:18

I see, thanks - that's food for thought. I assumed a 301 applied to the index page would suffice. I'll look in more depth at what pages are ranking highest, think it is indeed the index page which does.

Draeger · 27 Jun 2014 at 08:41

Just had a quick look in Google Webmaster Tools and the pages drawing in the most viewers appear to be the home/index page followed by a gallery of completed work page and then a 'before and after' page. So apply a 301 to the home page and those two pages you reckon?

AJK · 27 Jun 2014 at 09:30

Not sure if it has any bearing on things but as well as the new TLD he want's a complete redesign of the site to reflect the changes in the area he will be concentrating on. So it wont be just a straight move of the old website data to the new domain.

Yes, this is the biggest issue. If you were just changing the domain and removing a few pages for older services, you'd simply 301 the entire site and job done (more or less!)

(Incidentally, don't let the old domain expire - keep it. There will always be links out there pointing at the old domain, best that they should always work.)

But redesigning, and presumably restructuring, the whole site will involve carefully redirecting old pages to the closest analogous new page, which you should do across the whole site, not just a few select pages. Anything Google can't find it will just dump from the index, losing any SEO juice that link might have carried.