News Item: : Moving Domains
(Category: Work In Progress)
Posted by Str82u
Wednesday 03 March 2010 - 06:01:33
Over the last few weeks we worked to obtain a new .com TLD for a .net domain/website that is doing very well and becoming popular and relevant to common searches. The new location, http://www.countyjailinmatesearch.com has been live for nearly one week at this writing and had begun showing indexed pages and hopefully SERPs of it's own soon.
On the subject of moving a website from one domain to another, here are a few of the steps we took, some of which are found using Google's help section inside webmaster tools.
Advice to myself: Next time, as soon as you think you're going to get the domain you want, create a cpanel acount SOMEWHERE and UPLOAD all the pages you have available IMMEDIATELY! Get those ages aging, When the time comes, THEORETICALLY, it should be a help.
1. Preparing for the initial upload concerned changing any and all instances of the domain name occurring spelled out entirely in HTML, then in visible text. Using a simple "find and replace" tool, we did the previous steps with case sensitive turned on, sometimes the site name is written in all caps and we wanted it to stay that way. Sounds redundant, it is, but it's accurate as well.
2. Once the site tested out, we ran several tests on it for dead links and orphan pages, mostly to clean up previous mistakes and another check for accuracy.
3. Create a new profile in webmaster tools, verify, then enter a request to move your site in Webmaster Tools interface, do any verification required and submit a new sitemap. The effects here are dubious at best. Doing this step properly SHOULD (another theoretical) cause the page rank for one site to be transferred to the corresponding pages accordingly. Haven't seen that in either attempt doing this.
4. Once we were sure that everything was covered for search engines and to prevent any redirects ending in loops or 404 errors, we created a permanent (301) WILDCARD redirect for the entire .net website to the www.com website. That type of redirect tells search engines your intention is to move from one place to another and the content is NOT coming back.
5. The last step, after testing all the pages from the site map to ensure they arrive at the new destination and how fast, is to get any backlinks to your old site changed to the new site.
Some of the best advice is probably obvious, but here it is anyhow. Make your move as close to 1:1 change as possible. If the site you're moving has good PR and will take a while to get re situated with your link partners, DON'T try to rebrand on the new domain, you might as well just start a whole new website instead, then swap them if you're successful. The move needs to be seamless is the point.
Back to bed coffee heads, that really was it. If something was overlooked, it will come out. Don't jump the gun trying to retune or SEO or site until ALL pages have been indexed and appear as SERPs using the command "site:". During the switch, the list of top words associated with your site can be off if the current combination of pages indexed are higher in keywords you aren't promoting.
Keep an eye on it and Keep it Str8!
This news item is from SEO At Work
( http://ihaveyounow.com/news.php?extend.44 )
(Category: Work In Progress)
Posted by Str82u
Wednesday 03 March 2010 - 06:01:33
Over the last few weeks we worked to obtain a new .com TLD for a .net domain/website that is doing very well and becoming popular and relevant to common searches. The new location, http://www.countyjailinmatesearch.com has been live for nearly one week at this writing and had begun showing indexed pages and hopefully SERPs of it's own soon.
On the subject of moving a website from one domain to another, here are a few of the steps we took, some of which are found using Google's help section inside webmaster tools.
Advice to myself: Next time, as soon as you think you're going to get the domain you want, create a cpanel acount SOMEWHERE and UPLOAD all the pages you have available IMMEDIATELY! Get those ages aging, When the time comes, THEORETICALLY, it should be a help.
1. Preparing for the initial upload concerned changing any and all instances of the domain name occurring spelled out entirely in HTML, then in visible text. Using a simple "find and replace" tool, we did the previous steps with case sensitive turned on, sometimes the site name is written in all caps and we wanted it to stay that way. Sounds redundant, it is, but it's accurate as well.
2. Once the site tested out, we ran several tests on it for dead links and orphan pages, mostly to clean up previous mistakes and another check for accuracy.
3. Create a new profile in webmaster tools, verify, then enter a request to move your site in Webmaster Tools interface, do any verification required and submit a new sitemap. The effects here are dubious at best. Doing this step properly SHOULD (another theoretical) cause the page rank for one site to be transferred to the corresponding pages accordingly. Haven't seen that in either attempt doing this.
4. Once we were sure that everything was covered for search engines and to prevent any redirects ending in loops or 404 errors, we created a permanent (301) WILDCARD redirect for the entire .net website to the www.com website. That type of redirect tells search engines your intention is to move from one place to another and the content is NOT coming back.
5. The last step, after testing all the pages from the site map to ensure they arrive at the new destination and how fast, is to get any backlinks to your old site changed to the new site.
Some of the best advice is probably obvious, but here it is anyhow. Make your move as close to 1:1 change as possible. If the site you're moving has good PR and will take a while to get re situated with your link partners, DON'T try to rebrand on the new domain, you might as well just start a whole new website instead, then swap them if you're successful. The move needs to be seamless is the point.
Back to bed coffee heads, that really was it. If something was overlooked, it will come out. Don't jump the gun trying to retune or SEO or site until ALL pages have been indexed and appear as SERPs using the command "site:". During the switch, the list of top words associated with your site can be off if the current combination of pages indexed are higher in keywords you aren't promoting.
Keep an eye on it and Keep it Str8!
This news item is from SEO At Work
( http://ihaveyounow.com/news.php?extend.44 )