Retain your search engine rank in spite of domain relocation

It takes a lot of time, effort, strategies and patience to attain higher position in search engine results page. Now, if you think of moving your website to another domain, you wouldn’t ever want to lose the rank attained in the search engine results; in short, you don’t want all your SEO efforts to go into vain. If you’re considering shifting your website to a new domain, below are a few tips that’ll prove handy in retaining your website’s position in search engine results pages.

 

• If you’re relocating your domain due to a layout or rebranding issue of your website, you may consider executing this in two stages; firstly, shift your website and secondly, start on your redesign. This helps in managing the level of change your users experience at any point in the process, and makes the procedure appear smoother. Restricting the number of adjustments at any stage makes it simpler to troubleshoot unanticipated behavior.
• Make use of a 301 Redirect to move all pages on your previous website to your new website. This informs visitors as well as search engines that your website has permanently shifted. We suggest that you move or redirect a directory or section first, and then check to ensure that the redirects are functioning properly before relocating all your content.  
• Avoid performing a single shift, redirecting all visitors from the old location to the new home page. This’ll prove handy in avoiding 404 errors; however, this isn’t a user-friendly technique. It’s a bit lengthy and laborious process, but a page-to-page redirect helps preserving your website’s position in search engines, while offering a transparent and consistent experience for your visitors. In case, your new website fails to meet the elements of your old website (1:1 match), try to ensure that each page on your previous website is redirected to a different page with similar content.
• Confirm both internal as well as external links to pages on your website. Generally, you have to contact the owner of every site that connects to yours and request them to post the links to direct to the page on your fresh domain. Nevertheless, if this doesn’t prove to be useful, make certain that all pages with inward links are directed to your new home page. You must also test the internal links on your previous website, and update them to direct to your new web page. When the content is moved to your new domain or server, make use of a link checker to verify you don’t have any broken links on your website.

When you’ve completed all these steps, make use of the webmaster tools data to confirm that everything is running correctly. However, it may take some time for search engines to crawl through your old as well as new websites.