The SEO Implications of Moving or Changing your Website
>> Written on October 24th, 2008 by Leon
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
Tags: move website, new domain name, new hosting, website re-design
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8 Responses to “The SEO Implications of Moving or Changing your Website”
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Thanks for checking out my Blog! I'm a Multimedia/Web Designer based in Leitrim, Ireland. Leon. Subscription Options
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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..
Sorry, I don’t even have a Blogroll, its best if you just focus on good blog content rather than pointless reciprocal linking.
[...] Some things to bear in mind before changing your website. [...]
How come we cant use smilies on this blog? They lighten the mood up a bit.
Too cheesy!
Your blog looks great! I like it a lot! How did you get the ruler looking thing on the side of the template?
Ta. It’s a photoshop background, image of ruler with all but the gradients removed.
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.