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The SEO Implications of Moving or Changing your Website

This post was published 3 years 6 months 30 days ago which may make it a bit inaccurate or irrelevant today. Things change and I cant keep checking old posts for validity. I wont be held responsible for any misunderstanding. Leon - Reverb Studios

For owners of existing or well established websites, the need may arise to make considerable changes to the site, either as a result of a New Company Name and Domain, a required Site Facelift or a change of Site Structure, perhaps with the addition of a Content Management System, or just a change of Hosting Company. Heres some things to look out for.

New Domain Name

You might change your main Company Name or identify a better ‘keyworded’ domain and need to change the actual address of your site and if its been well indexed in the search engines then it becomes a major issue. What you need to do is use something like Google Analytics to see which are the top sites that link to you and contact them to change to your new address. You also need to contact your SEO or Web Design Company and ask them to put in place a ‘Redirect Solution’ to redirect all requests for the old address to the new one.

New Look Site and Structure

If your site looks tired or if you decide you want to manage its content yourself and add a Content Management System then its quite likely that most of your site content and pages/links will change. As above, you can implement redirects for specific pages or you can add a custom ‘Error 404 page’ which includes a full sitemap with links to your most important new pages.

New Webhost

You might need to change hosting company the odd time, maybe your current one has too much downtime or as in my case, it goes bust and takes all my sites with it! This shouldn’t cause any major SEO problems as all the important stuff basically stays the same. Just wait a few weeks after the change and make sure your stats package is still registering hits for the site in its new location.

If you need help with any of these issues Contact Me

Leon

This Article has had 420 views so far.

Posted in How to Guides on October 24th, 2008
Tags: move website, new domain name, new hosting, website re-design
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http://www.businessmanagementabcs.com Sue Massey

Hi there,

I looked over your blog and it looks really good. Do you ever do link exchanges on your blog roll? If you do, I’d like to exchange links with you.

Let me know if you’re interested.

Thanks..
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Sorry, I don’t even have a Blogroll, its best if you just focus on good blog content rather than pointless reciprocal linking.
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How come we cant use smilies on this blog? They lighten the mood up a bit.

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Too cheesy!

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Your blog looks great! I like it a lot! How did you get the ruler looking thing on the side of the template?

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Ta. It’s a photoshop background, image of ruler with all but the gradients removed.

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This is why it’s good to have a good plan of seo before you start. Moving a site to a new domain is a major problem. Might even be better to maintain two sites.
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Yes, this is right that these are the most important for The SEO Implications of Moving or Changing your Website. By using this process we can promote your site easily. Thanks for sharing this informative information with us.
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Thank you for this post, it was a great read. I like your point about using Google analytics to gauge important domains to let them know about website changes. Great tip. I use analytics and will use it for this purpose if I need to change domains!
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Its a great post.i wii definately share it with my friends.Thanks again and looking forward for your post on making more.
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Leon – Good tips on what to remember when moving your website to a newer version.
I agree its very easy for people to lose a lot of their old indexed pages and backlinks at the stroke of a domain change, host change etc. The redirection set up is vital to stop losing all that traffic! Thanks for this reminder. Steve
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I think rank for highly competitive this blog. Sometimes, if you change a website drastically. though that if in google, if over night we change the entire website, structure, format, hosting etc. The temporary reduction in traffic is usually well worth the better visitor experience. You have managed to transform a very helpful thought into reality. I was looking for someone who could help me in managing my.
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Hope, you keep updating it very frequently.
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Good points . I especially like your point about responding to comments and trying to promote the guest post on stumbleupon and other social media sites. The more you give back the more writing opportunities you will get.
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Thanks brother one of the finest tips of search engine optimization. The basics is the key and that’s what you are telling us thanks brother once again for this wonderful information
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Cheers Leon! Looking into doing this for a blog of mine and want to make sure I get it right!
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I agree when launch new version of web site your all index pages and back links are lost. But redirection setup is very useful to stop losing all back links and traffic.

Thanks
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Hey, How’s it going Leon?

I liked this post but I really wanted to know more about the loss of your websites. I have been wondering if something liked this happened would you be able to access your old information somehow, or would you have needed a back up of your “mysql database”?

I couldn’t image working so hard only to lose everything like the content, and links, community, and relationships. A lot goes into it but it looks like everything is running smoothly now for you! Good work and thanks for the post.