Changing your domain name, redirecting links and SEO implications

So picture the situation – you have an existing website (domain) which you want to completely redevelop, maybe to take on a more professional feel or maybe you just want to develop a common look and feel across all of your websites.

Generally as long as you don’t start wiping out large sections of your page copy, start removing page titles or make sweeping changes to your internal linking, then this shouldn’t be a huge problem.

But what if you also want to change the domain name as well? For instance, maybe your current domain name was good when your company was smaller, and now you need something that better reflects your services or status! However, your current domain has say a PR3 status and a (potentially large) number of links pointing at it from other sites.

Link building and developing PR status can take a considerable amount of time and effort. Therefore, what we need is a successful method of launching a new site, while asking the search engines to associate the page rank and links of the old site, with the new site.

The best way of doing this is to use what is called a 301 redirect, which effectively tells the search engines that all queries to the old site should be directed to the new one, along with all of the links and PR. However, while a 301 redirect will instantly send all queries to the old site to the new site, it is often suggested that the process of transferring PR and links can take up to six months.

A 301 redirect is the best method of effectively shutting down one domain, while keeping the ‘juicy’ bits which will help your new domain. Other redirects such as ‘302’ redirects are frowned upon by the search engines, as they have historically been used by website hackers to redirect web surfers to pages not related to the domain the user requested. We will cover physical implementation of 301 redirects in a later discussion.