A few times in your career, you may need to work on a re-branding effort or merger or acquisition, which usually means a domain name change. At the onset, the change can seem very intimidating and daunting, simply because there are so many things that could go wrong or overlooked. Ultimately, it means that website that you or your team have worked long and hard to optimize, rank, and grow can be undone. Domain name changes can be a major source of potential stress, but it doesn’t have to be. Thankfully we have a myriad to tools at our disposal as marketers to change from one domain to another domain name and preserve our rankings.
I’ve assembled a list of things that I’ve used across my career to transition domain names and retain rankings as much as possible and quickly get your site re-indexed properly.
Domain Transition Checklist
Prep Work & Planning
- Let Customers Know
- URL Redirects
- Third-Party Services
Post-Change
- Reassure Customers
- Canonical Tags
- Webmaster Tools
- Press and News Updates
- Third-Party Services
- Cleaning Up Missed 404 Errors
Prep Work & Planning
Obviously, you’ll want to get started on planning for the domain name change. It’s important to document an action plan and think through not only the domain change will affect your company, but also how the domain name change will affect things beyond rankings – that’s being a proactive leader. Here are some items to get you started.
Let Customers Know
Is this change something your customers should be aware of beforehand? If so, consider putting a notice on your existing site to prep them. Imagine yourself as a client – you visit a known site of a vendor, and then one day are then redirected to a new site with a new domain name without notice. Would you feel concerned? Confused? Perhaps a little hesitant? It’s always best to let the people who give you money know about a future change if possible.
If the change is something that must be kept secret or private, you’ll want to institute a heavy news and PR blitz (see below). You’ll want to get the word out so that customers can know as quickly as possible, from a variety of sources, that the redirect they are hitting is legitimate.
URL Redirects
Now is a good time to take inventory of your existing site’s URLs and infrastructure. This means that you’ll either need to crawl your site, or get a list of all URL’s from something like an XML sitemap. The goal here is to take stock of all URL’s that you have.
If the domain name change will include a new design and changes in your URL structure (as they can often), then you’ll want to consider where the existing URL’s should redirect to – this may take a generous amount of planning time.
Setting Up Your Redirects
Depending on how much your hosting is set up, you will have to implement redirects differently.
For example, if you use WordPress you can use the Redirection plugin to create and import redirects. Perhaps the most common way is with an .htaccess file. Using an .htaccess file, you’ll want to end up with a list of all URL redirects that will be formatted like this
Redirect 301 /oldpage http://www.yournewdomain.com/newpage
If your domain name change doesn’t include a new site or structure, that’s great – most likely all URL redirects can be handled with a simple rewrite rule. An example .htaccess rule would be:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourolddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourolddomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yournewdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC
There are many more things that can be done using rewrite rules – these should cover most of what is needed.
Third Party Services
While you are considering the domain name change, you’ll want to consider any third party services that may rely on your site. Here are some things that I have encountered:
- SSL
- SSL’s should be acquired for the new domain names – your IT dept or hosting may be in charge of this, or you may. Best to double-check and be sure it’s addressed.
- Email Blast
- Be sure that any email systems have corrected domain names, as well as check that they don’t use your site for image hosting. If they do, you’ll want to create issues and an attack plan to have those addressed.
- CC Gateways
- If your site takes online payments, notifying the payment gateways is definitely in order – many times they will need to add your domain to the approved authorization list.
- Pay-Per-Click
- Many PPC providers won’t display ads if they detect a 301 redirect and will pause active campaigns – this means that all ads will have to be updated with new URL’s.
- Landing Pages
- Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot – these are a sampling of landing pages that should be reviewed to ensure proper functionality throughout the change.
- Analytics
- Of course you’ll want to review your Analytics tools to see how to handle a domain name change.
Post-Change
In this moment, future-you just pulled the trigger. Now is when the panic sets in, right? It’s OK, you’ve planned this out – now you just need to work the plan that past-you put in place. You go, past-you. Here’s your post-change gameplan.
Canonical Tags
If your site doesn’t have any new structure or URL’s and is simply a domain name change, canonical tags are a great way to ensure that any URL’s are quickly indexed with the new domain name. Canonical tags go in the <head> of any page, and tell a search engine, “No matter how you got here, no matter what URL you have this previously indexed for – this defined URL is the real URL that should be indexed and ignore any others”.
Here is an example canonical tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yournewdomain.com/somepage/" />
Webmaster Tools
Letting the search engines know that you have a new site is important. Google has a special place in it’s Webmaster Tools that helps you change your domain name.
If you’ve moved your site to a new domain, you can use the Change Of Address Tool to tell Google about your new URL. We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL. Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL.
Press & News Sites
No matter if you have a secret rebranding, or have been able to prep customers – sending out a Press Release and News blitz is a great way to help your site. It puts the news in front of existing customers and new customers alike, as well as helps build credibility if anyone decides to research why they landed on a new domain name. Additionally, if your new domain name has no history or inbound links, this can help promote it.
Third Party Services
All of the third-party items above should now be resolved and working properly post-change. Be sure to test each item out as quickly as possible to minimize any issues and address them quickly.
Cleaning Up Missed 404 Errors
You will want to keep an eye out on these, just in case there were any URLs that were missed in the 301 redirection phase. Creating 301 redirects for each 404 or group of 404 subpages (such as a “news” or “events”) is a good idea to preserve rankings as well as send customers to the new page.
I recommend the following schedule for checking your 404’s:
- Immediately after launch for up to a few hours
- 1 day later after the Search Engines have been notified
- 3 days later, once traffic has leveled off from your News & Press releases and referral traffic weighs in
- If after 3 days you have a significant number of 404 errors you’ll want to put further efforts in place to monitor these as your redirect phase missed the mark.
Conclusion
Hopefully this list will get your domain name change off to a solid start. It’s always nerve-racking, but having a plan that can be peer-reviewed and documented can help smooth the transition out.
In conclusion, Google’s Matt Cutts has put together a great how-to video to explain what’s going on with a domain change and what to expect.
Was anything missed? Did something go awry with your domain name change that others should know about? Drop me a comment below.
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