‘Move it’ doesn’t have to mean ‘lose it’

It doesn’t happen often, but there may come a time that you have to change domain names. It could be because a product that you offered has grown so large that it needs its own site or perhaps your company has merged with another and you have started trading with a different business name.

Whatever the reason, you are now faced with the daunting prospect of moving your website to a different address that has no links, no rank and no authority.

Fortunately there is a technique called the “301 Redirect” which can help and even Google recommends this by stating:

You can also redirect one version to the other using a a 301 redirect. This should resolve the situation after our crawler discovers the change. For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.

If you have a larger website (1000+ pages) it can take a little longer for the search engines to crawl all the pages, but it does work. SEObook has a great case-study where Aaron moves a large website and discusses the process, how the search engines reacted and how the move affected his search traffic – How to: Move a Website…Should You Fear 301 Redirects Hurting Your Rankings?

If you’re not moving your whole website, but simply have to update some file extensions (ie. change .html to .php) or you want to move a folder or directory, Matt from SEOmoz has this great article: Guide to Applying 301 Redirects with Apache.

So if the day ever comes to move your whole site, or part-thereof, at least you know you can make the move with confidence that it shouldn’t hurt your rankings.