We see it time and time again - someone switches website design companies, buys a new domain name and/or decides to redesign or re-develop their website without proper consultation or forethought. The usual outcome? Not good!

Most website owners don’t know the necessary steps that must be considered and many times implemented in order to assure that any value in their existing website does not get lost altogether.

That time is no more; I am going to provide you with the necessary things to consider before your website is moved / overhauled and also the essential things to implement when you are ready to make the move and/or bring in the bulldozers.

Please note that recommendations are different for moving to a new IP address.

I highly recommend that you consult with an SEO professional before trying to implement any of this yourself if you do not have a good understanding of the concepts and reasoning behind these steps.

BEFORE You Move / Overhaul Your Website

What kind of natural value does your website currently have?

Only once you become aware of what your site’s natural value is should you even consider moving or completely overhauling your website.

• Check your site’s key terms and phrases to see where they are ranking in the search engine’s natural results. Moving or completely overhauling your site may cause your new site to lose those established rankings as search engines need to re-index all of your new information.

  Not sure what your site’s keywords are?

• Check your site analytics to see which keywords are bringing you the most traffic
• Contact an SEO professional to run a complete analysis of your website

• Analyze your site’s backlinks that have been accumulated over time. Moving or completely overhauling your site will most likely cause multiple broken backlinks, thus significantly hurting the value they have been sending your site.

  Not sure what your site’s backlinks are or how to check them

• Check your site analytics to see which websites / urls are linking to your website
• Contact an SEO professional to run a complete analysis of your website

DURING the Move / Overhaul of Your Website

Test the Move Process

• Move the contents of one directory or sub-domain as a test

• Use a 301 redirect to permanently redirect the pages on your old site to your new site

301 redirect: tells the search engines that your site / page has permanently moved

 
Double Check the Search Results of the Pages on Your New Site

• Make sure these new pages are getting picked up, indexed and displayed correctly by the search engines

• When you feel comfortable that the move is working correctly, then move your entire site

• Do NOT do a “blanket” redirect of your whole site as it is not the best solution for user experience

• Use “page-to-page” redirects for optimal results and the best possible user experience

• Assure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to some new page with similar content

 
Changing Your Domain for Rebranding or Redesign?

• Move your site first

• Then launch your redesign
  *This keeps the variables to a minimum and makes unexpected behavior easier to troubleshoot

Check both External / Internal Links on Your Site AND the Backlinks to Your Site from Other Sites

• Check ALL internal links within your old site and update them to point to your new domain

• Contact the webmaster of each site that has links pointing to your site to have them update those urls

• Once your content is in place, use a link checking tool like Xenu to weed out broken legacy links

AFTER the Move / Overhaul of Your Website

Don’t Trash that Old Domain

• Retain your old website domain for at least 180 days

Utilize Webmaster Tools

• Setup a Google Webmaster Tools account

• Verify ownership of your new site

• Create and submit sitemap listing the URLs on your new site

• Keep your old and new site verified in Google’s Webmaster Tools to review crawl errors and  404 errors

This whole process is most definitely not simple or quick. However, these necessary steps will help to ensure that any value that your website has accrued does not get completely lost. Although a lot of this is somewhat more technical than average website owner is used to, it is all very essential to a successful search engine optimization start up and maintenance campaign.

As always, if you need any help along the way, our team is more than happy to assist you in this whole process. Just let us know by emailing us or dropping us a comment below.