As you know, I had rebranded my old blog domain to Blognamic dot com. I did some research and of course, gathered a few advices from the experienced web guys before i actually did the correct way. Doing the correct way is important as it ensures that you will not lose any SERP rankings and get blacklisted by the big “G”.
The Wrong Way
This is what i have done wrong and is NOT recommended. My old blog name is derek-ang.com, therefore to rebrand the blog, my initial thoughts was to parked my new domain, blognamic.com to the directory in my server that my files is located. So for example, derek-ang.com and blognamic.com will be parked to /sites/blog ( the same directory path). However, this is a big mistake in terms of SEO. For technical aspects, it works perfectly fine. However, in SEO, search engines DO NOT LIKE duplicate content. Parking the 2 domains to the directory will results in duplicate listing in the search engine when they spidered your site. And this ultimately can result in your website being blacklisted by search engines.
The Recommended Way
The following steps are the best practices when moving your website to a new url; rebranding
1) Sign up for Google Webmaster Tool
2) Verify the ownership of both your website.
3) Create 301 redirects from old url to new url.
4) Submit change of address to inform Google webmaster team that you have change your url.
5) Submit sitemap for new url so that Google can index your new url pages.
How to create a 301 redirect
This is where some technical parts come into issue. Configuring 301 redirects is a relatively simple process that consist of only 2 steps. ( However, configuring 301 redirects differs from different webservers).
Step 1 - Edit your httpd.conf file to allow 301 redirects
Add “AllowOverride All” to the end of the configuration file. After all save the file and restart webserver ( apache) to allows changes to take effect.
Step 2 - Adding .htaccess file for adding 301 redirect entries
To redirect from old site to a new website. Below are entries that you need to enter.
For example,
redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.newsite.com/about/
So what the above entries do is to rediect http://www.oldsite.com to http://www.newsite.com and http://www.oldsite.com/about/ to http://www.newsite.com/about/
After you have create all entries for your page, save the .htaccess file ( name the file as .htaccess) and upload into the root directory of your old website location.
It is recommended to create page by page redirects so that you can ensure that all pages in your old website are redirected to the new website successfully. After one day, login to Google webmaster tool to see if there’s any crawlers errors.
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
Very helpful advice, however, I heard it can’t be done on free blogspot.com domain, or maybe it can after all?
@Ebook blogspot: For blogspot-hosted domains, it may be hard as users do not have the permissions to access the server. However, there might be a 301 redirect options in the blogspot control panel. I am not sure about this. It will be better to send google an email.
This is really useful information. Thanks.
it reminds me that it is incredibly important to set up a customised page 404 for when people come to a page that does not exist for some reason. So many sites do not have this and lose visitors as a result.
Using permanent redirect to a new domain name also help to pass the pagerank juice back to the new domain.
@Syuxx: You’re right.
Cool useful information Derek, this article realy help me, I think the same Syuxx. Best regards
Maybe I’m in business for a few years but still feel like I’m walking on mine field. One mistake and you can be thrown out from google search base and that is a huge disaster.
Blognamic is good rather than derek-ang. you highlighted importance
Great info Derak, but what happened after your derek-ang.com domain expire? Do you still need to renew it or just leave it?
Ample
good advice, mate. stay far and clear of dup content issues. make sure the content on the old domain is dead and gone!
The long sought similar information. I am very grateful to the author. Great text. Thank you
These will help to many of your fan.
Thank you, I was searching for help changing my domain name and I will certainly use your tips so big G won’t bother me
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Thanks for the post, was searching a while now for a good guide.
Thanks for the tips. Very useful
I have a new website but how to set domain name, web hosting, etc how to create the new website?
Well I think when you are working in a same web site for a long period of time then you need to be with the same domain. because when you change your web site then your all backing will gone out and again you have to work from the begging.
I find here a good platform that have a good advice to change your website domain name the correct way with good steps.
very good article, i found this article is very informative. do post more articles like this. thank you very much
Quite interesting. I truly loved visiting your site. Thanks.
This is very nice information
It looks difficult if you don’t have any experience with this. The information is useful and I’m chaining my website domain. Thanks!
It isn’t difficult, soon i’ll be posting up something the same with transferring WordPress