Changing a website domain

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josephinhd

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Hey all! So my brother wants to change the domain name for his personal site. Its a bit long but it currently has a lot of great links coming to it from websites such as the Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, ESPN, the New York Times, etc as they have all written articles about him. My question is if we change the domain from www longer url dot com to www shorter url dot com how do we keep all of the SERP's for keywords his site is currently ranking very high for?
 
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If you're positive that's what you want to do: 1. Do a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one 2. Use the Change of Address feature in goog webmaster tools 3. Throw a 404 handler on the new site (specifics of it will depend on the platform, but a nice 404 handler that can parse incoming requests and try to find good matches would be very helpful)
 
gregstereo said:
If you're positive that's what you want to do: 1. Do a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one 2. Use the Change of Address feature in goog webmaster tools 3. Throw a 404 handler on the new site (specifics of it will depend on the platform, but a nice 404 handler that can parse incoming requests and try to find good matches would be very helpful)
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Very good advice
 
How are you doing in terms of SERPS and traffic?
 
gregstereo said:
If you're positive that's what you want to do: 1. Do a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one 2. Use the Change of Address feature in goog webmaster tools 3. Throw a 404 handler on the new site (specifics of it will depend on the platform, but a nice 404 handler that can parse incoming requests and try to find good matches would be very helpful)
Click to expand...

I would also suggest you not to change the content of the website at the same time with changing the domain name. I've seen reports where sites have lost most of their link strength after moving over to a new domain name even when doing a 301 redirect and letting Google know about the change of address but it's most likely been because with the new website new content was used as well and because of that Google might have considered it a new site.
 
As gregstereo said just do a 301 redirect to the new site from the old domain then you can go to google webmaster tools and create a redirect from your old domain to your new one and you won't lose any backlinks from major sites as you said.About SERP,From my experience, you amy lose your current rankings,may be for sometime only.But google tends to play with it.Eventually you will get the rankings back,so don't worry about a sudden drop,if that occurs.



 
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