Hello.

We're back for another sort of tutorial video today.

We're going to talk about a topic that a lot of people are interested in.

How do I move from one domain to another domain and try to preserve the rankings as best as possible?

You might be moving from old domain to new domain.

Let's talk through some of the possible things to be thinking about and some of the stuff that you might want to make sure you avoid as far as problems.

Okay, so here's what we've got.

We've got a site, maybe with a sub directory or a subdomain.

In fact, we've got two or three sites here, and you've got a new domain right now.

It's just a park domain.

One piece of advice I would give very early on is if you know that you're going to move to a new domain, don't just let it be parked.

Go ahead and say, okay, I'm going to put something up there, even if it's just a small mini stubby version of the site, even if it's only the one page that's the main page of the site, the root page of the site, that it's got something there that indicates it's not just like one of the tens of millions of park domains.

So go ahead and put a new site up there.

It doesn't have to be pretty.

It doesn't have to have a lot of CSS, JavaScript and all that stuff.

Just a couple of paragraphs to say this is going to be the new site.

This is going to be the new destination of whoever the company is or something along those lines because we have classifiers that try to detect parked pages.

And if you go from parked to a normal domain, we try to detect that transition as quickly as we can.

But if you give us a little more time, more time to crawl, see, process the page.

It's a little more likely that we'll be able to handle it just fine.

Okay, so we're moving from an old site.

In fact, maybe two or three old sites, and we're going to consolidate to a new site.

So first off, you really would rather not just jump in with both feet, dive into the deep end of the pool.

What you'd rather do is test it a little bit first.

So what you can do is you can make sure that you've got the new content or the content ported over to the new site, and you can just kind of start with a sub directory or a sub domain.

Start with a part of the site, and do a three or one permanent redirect to the new location.

Now, this is assuming that you're moving for all time and eternity. So this is the good case for a permanent or 301 redirect. If you were planning to undo this later or it's temporary, then you'd use a 302 redirect whenever you send the Http status codes.

Okay, so what you can do is you can test by redirecting this part of the site over to the new part of the new site, and you can say, does this continue to rank?

Okay.

And if for some reason, like three or one and it just turns into a black hole and it doesn't rank at all, then don't move everything over quite yet.

Do a little bit of investigation.

Maybe the previous owner had done some spam on this domain, and you need to do a reconsideration request or something along those lines.

But don't just move everything over without doing a little bit of a test, if you can on a subpart or a part of the site first.

Now what if you've got multiple sites like here's site, one, two, and three, and you're going to consolidate them all into one brand or all into one website?

That's a perfectly fine, perfectly natural thing to do.

So you can do the 301 with these guys as well.

But the thing to do is I would start with the smallest traffic domain. So imagine that you're merging these three sites together.

Start with the one that doesn't get much traffic.

Do that 301 redirect and make sure that things sort of flow away, make sure that things look all right.

As far as the transition that way, you're not putting the domain that's responsible for most of your traffic at risk.

You're making sure that everything is flowing.

Okay, before you start to eventually take the next biggest site and then the next biggest site, and do those three or one redirects that way.

Okay.

Some other stuff to think about.

If you own all of these sites, or if you control all of these sites, you can add the verification codes and register your site in Webmaster Central so that you can get stats for all these sites.

So one thing you might want to think about is look at the people who link to your old domain.

Now, it's definitely the case that you don't need to write to every single person who has ever linked to your domain and say, hey, can you update and point to the new location of my domain?

But it might be worth doing for just the most conspicuous, the biggest the most important links that point to your old site. So if CNN or the New York Times or the La Times or the Chicago Tribune or Wikipedia, some really big site does link to your domain.

Those are the ones that it might be worth doing a little bit of attention to and say, hey, write to the owner or edit the page on Wikipedia and say that this page has moved to this new location.

That way, search engines should be able to follow the trail of all the 301 redirects, but you're just making it simpler.

You're fixing it upstream.

So even if a new search engine comes along and has no idea what's going on, they just follow that link and then the page rank flows.

See if there's anything else.

If you're going to change to a new domain, and at the same time, you're planning on changing your template.

So you're going to change your UI, all that sort of stuff you might want to do a little bit of thinking about trying to decouple that right, because doing a redirect, you'realready shifting from one location to another location.

And then if you completely revamp your entire site at the same time, imagine if things don't go well.

For whatever reason, maybe you've done a bunch of Ajax much JavaScript, and there's not as much text that's indexable on the page.

If you've done something like that, it's hard to tell.

Was it shifting to the new domain, or was it the revamp of the site?

So if it's possible, the more you can decouple that just like moving a small part of the site or your site that hadthe smallest amount of traffic.

First, lets you just look around the corner a little bit and see if everything works the way that I expect it to work.

So those are some rules of thumbs, if you can, it's really helpful if you can leave the old site up for quite a while.

I did a test where I moved from mattcuts.

Com to a site I had happened to buy called dullest.

Com, and I left it up for 90 days, 180 days, plenty of time for people to see all the 301 redirects.

Everything happening to make sure that it was processing correctly. And that worked very well.

And if you handle this in a slow, careful, deliberate way, then things should go quite fine.

And we've seen lots and lots of reports about people shifting to new domains, and everything goes completely smoothly.

But there are definitely these kinds of steps that you can do to make sure that things, if anything does go wrong, or if there's anything you can't explain, you have an ability to say, oh, this was the revamping of the site versus this was shifting the site to a new location.

So those are just some simple rules of thumb to keep in mind whenever if you're moving to a new domain, hope things go well for you.