Change the Domain Name without affecting SEO performance

Earlier were the days where everyone was looking for the domain name with extension .com, .org and all. There was no tough situation to choose and book the domain name. People mostly believed in .com domain that it would beat anything else available.

Without any much research, people were deciding the domain suitable for their business. Later on SEO came into existence which has great impact on the website performance. As the time passed, people came to about about user experience and its importance in small little things you do for your website.

Now apart from domain with suffixes such .in, .co.uk there are also domain suffixes which gives more information about ones business such as .accountant, .doctor , .casino and many more. Now a days you can choose the domain name which best suits your business along with related suffix. But while the choice is there, and many are tempted to switch a website’s domain name to something better, few do. The reason for this is, of course, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Here is a basic guide for an effective domain name change. Follow these steps If you are changing your domain name and it will have lesser impact on SEO performance.

1. Check for the domain name to be registered before you buy

- Use whois tool to see the details of the domain name. Check if the domain was penalised by Google in any fashion. Check the history using Google Ad-sense. You might also want to find out if a name is a registered trademark to avoid future legal problems.

2. Take the website back up

When you will be moving your website under a new domain, you may require to move to the new servers or to the new account on same servers. In this case, it is necessary to take a full back up of your website. So that in case you tend to loose something, you can instantly restore the back up.

3. Pointing the URLs

When you change your domain name obviously the URLs will also get changed. So it is important to point the old URLs to your new URLs so that the visitors don't get lost. A 301 Redirect means servers recognise a move as being ‘permanent’. If the move is permanent, Google will transfer any SEO benefits from an old URL to the new URL.

4. Add new sitemap

Sitemap has all the URLs of the website. So make sure you upload a fresh XML sitemap of the site so that it becomes easier for Google to read the site pages. Upload the new sitemap from Google webmaster

5. Add a 404 redirect page.

To redirect the people visiting your old URLs, a 404 redirect page is necessary.

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