Some Initial Preparation For Migrating To A New Domain
I knew about some of the negative and bad experiences that other people have had while they were trying to do this, this was the reason why there was a lot of research and preparation for this project. While I was doing the research on this, I actually became worried and concerned about how big the project was. Our website had more 70,000 URLs, and we had several rule sets that were used for various url paths. We also had some large amount of data on our test server too.
Since this was a solo SEO and independent in-house effort, it was not quite easy to get other people to share some ideas with. Fortunately for me though, I had some contacts on LinkedIn that I was able to converse and communicate with regularly on this. I may also be of some help to you, if you need some reassurances on what you may be doing too. (Details on this are available at the end of this write-up/post).
Creating Your Site URLs List
You will initially need a full/comprehensive list of all your site’s web page urls. You may get this by creating a script or by using a tool like Xenu to spider your website. You should however note that if your site is large and you are using an average computer, your Excel spreadsheet software may freeze when you try to use it on a large list of urls.
With your list, you can then use some rules/formulas in your spreadsheet software to create some new urls in the cells besides your old urls. This may then serve as a good reference for your affiliates and/or PPC manager, that is, if you use or have them.
If your site is small, then the list can serve as a basis for your 301s list too. If you do not have any idea on how to set up 301s, you can simply search for more information on it through the search engines. If you however have a big/large site like mine, you will then need to work with your developers/programmers to set up and run some redirect rules, that will be based on how your new urls should be constructed.
Compile And Review Your Backlinks
One of the other tasks that I also needed to do with the project was to update the backlinks to my site. You will in reality not be able to update all the backlinks to your website. Some tools you can use to sort out how important each of the backlink to your site is include Majestic SEO – Link Intelligence and SEOMoz’s Linkscape. I was able to use the two tools together with Excel to determine the top sites that were linking to my site by their importance. You should generally keep the list of your backlinks until the actual day you will be switching over.
Testing
We tested this migration project on our server too. You should ideally do this if you can, since it will help you to determine how well your migrating to a new domain works before it becomes live. What I was mainly looking for with the test was the 404 and 500 messages/pages that may come up, I also wanted to ensure that the 301s were redirecting to the right pages too. For a big site like ours, it would have taken quite a lot of time to check through all our results, hence we only cross-checked about 70 percent of our highest converting pages, and then the other pages with lower conversions.
Ranking Reports
You should generally set your site rank monitoring software/programs up to run on a daily basis after you may have made the switch, for some weeks. This should help you to know immediately if there are any issues or problems.
Webmaster Tools
You will also need to set up a verified Google Webmaster account for the new domain too. You will need to do this to gain some access to the account’s Change of Address tool.
Your Site’s 404 Page
You will also need to provide a helpful 404 page for your site. You may put some links to your sitemap and to some of your top level web pages on a 404 page, you may also include some site search tool on the page too.
Switch Or Changeover Day
After you may have completed all your post migration tasks, you can then switch or changeover to your new domain. Your developers should generally confirm that everything is alright. Some of what you will need to do after this are as follows.
Spidering The Site
The first step that I took after our migration is to browse our site in order to determine if its web page addresses have changed. I also did a search on Google for our old domain and some clicking too on its top links. By using the Firebug tool on Firefox, I was able to see that our site pages were redirecting to the new urls.
To ensure that everything was running as it should be, I then ran an A1 spider/sitemap generator on the site. I was able to get some results from this and was also able to generate the sitemap.xml file for the site too. You will need to upload a sitemap.xml file to your site.
You may then log in into Google’s Webmaster Tools to start your Change of Address. You will need to add the link to your sitemap.xml file to your Webmaster account. Google will then do the necessary changes after you may have initiated a Change of Address, effecting such changes may generally take a while.
Your Web Analytics Reporting/Tracking
If you are still using the same web analytics account, you will need to change/modify the details of the account and will also need to ensure that it would work with your new domain name.
If you are running an ecommerce site, you will need to test your orders to see if your basket url path has changed. You should check the url at every stage of the ordering process in order to ensure that the urls match the Goal paths in your analytics software. You will also need to check your site’s final Goal urls too, if the urls have changed, you will then need to change/update each Goal point.
Contacting Webmasters
You will then need to within some weeks, use the backlinks’ list that you created earlier on, to contact the webmasters of the websites that were linking to your old domain with some highly converting links. To contact a site, you will need the webmaster’s name, you may look for this directly on a site or may check the web page code on the site to get a name. If you cannot get a name through these, you may use a whois tool (like Domain Tools) to check the url of the site. You should be able to get enough information with this to contact the site’s webmaster through Linkedln or some other means.
I had a message/note that I generally send, the introductory part of the message simply explained the changes that were carried out on our site, while the customised part will typically state the url of the page each site was linking to and what our new urls for them were, we will then ask them to kindly update the link from their end.
Monitoring Your Site
You will need to track/monitor your site and everything that is related to it on a daily basis in order to ensure that the transition is going on as well as you want it to be. You will need to check your Google’s Webmaster Tools account for 404s, you will also need to check your site error logs too. You should also be on the lookout for any form of oddity in your web analytics reporting. You will need to ensure that your site is generating some sales and converting too.
Newsletter / PR
You will also need to inform others about your domain change too. Informing your customers and using some small press campaign should be enough to announce the change. If you however did a re-branding of your site too, you are likely to need a newsletter and some bigger press campaign.
You should ideally keep on monitoring your site until it is running as smoothly as you want. This could take up to a month or more, it was about one and half months in our own case.
Some Of The Results That We Had
The migration process was so easy and smooth for me that I actually thought that there was something wrong. My ranking report showed that we were ranking for 16 generic keywords on the front page of Google. We switched over on December 22, 2009, two days after this I noticed that our new domain was getting some rankings. Within 5 days the domain had gained all of our rankings. Within 10 days, our rankings with the new domain had gone up to the top 20, the rankings then fluctuated for some time at that position. On January 13 however they went back to what their positions were initially before the changeover/switch by plus or minus two positions. About a month after this, there was also some substantial increase with them too. Our ranking positions are better now than they were before we did the domain changeover/switch. I personally think that, the fact that the new domain name that we changed to, was twice as old as our old domain had some impact on our rankings. My directory submissions and link building efforts would have also helped too. As it is typical with SEO, several factors would have generally contributed to how we ended up with a better ranking position.
Some Of What To Remember
You should not forget to use 301 redirects in order not to miss some of the important pages on your site.
You should remember to change/update your site content links to the new page paths and urls too.
You should try to get to the webmasters of all the sites that were linking to your old domain, if it is possible.
You should test extensively too, once there are no broken urls/links and everything is working smoothly, you may then go live.
You should not forget your Pay Per Click (that is, PPC) campaigns too. You will generally need to change/update all your ads’ target and display urls, which may be a considerable task for you if you are managing a lot of keywords.
You will need to inform your affiliates about your domain change too, you should ideally provide your affiliates with your new urls in order to make it easier for them to deal with the new change. You will also need to update/change the urls of the banners etc that you may have provided to them.
And you should never allow your old domain to expire. Some visitors will still use your site old domain url to get to you, it should therefore be used to redirect your visitors to your new domain.
Here are a few good resources on migrating a site.
- http://www.seroundtable.com/the-guardian-domain-change-18133.html