Your onsite content must be precisely redirected to its new address, regardless of whether your company is moving to another server or rebranding and renaming itself. You need to complete the redirects properly, otherwise, 404 File Not Found errors will appear on your website, negatively impacting the user experience, resulting in a higher rate of bounces and reduced search engine rankings.
It is likely that your SEO agency will be able to perform the technical work for you if you do need a thorough series of redirects carried out on your site. As a result, you will be able to avoid most of the problems associated with moving your site to another domain or server.
Changing URL
It is crucial to move your contents from one domain to another, such as when changing your company’s name or moving from a .co.uk address to a .com one.
In case of branding or URL changes
- You should create a sitemap for the old URLs of your domain.
- Similarly, you need to create one for your newly acquired domain.
- The most relevant URL on your new domain should be 301-redirected to each URL on your old domain. The defunct page of the old domain should be redirected to the closest or most similar page on the new domain if it does not have an immediate or obvious counterpart. A 301-redirect to the new homepage may be necessary if the new site does not have any products or services remotely related to the old site.
- Any old website pages that are essentially identical to new website pages can be marked up with rel=canonical. Choosing which version of a page should appear at the top of SERPs will inform search engines of how important it is.
- It is important to maintain your old version of the site. 301 redirects will carry over link juice from the old to the new version so that the old version continues to pass on links from the new. In the event that your old website is completely shut down, its inbound links to the new website will no longer pass link juice.
- All versions of the website should be hosted on the same server, without being split up between different servers.
- Conduct all necessary inbound marketing and SEO optimization of the new website.
In case of a website redesign
Redesign your website following SEO best practices, which includes ensuring that spiderable content is used and avoiding technologies that are not crawlable, if possible. After creating a new version of the site, it is imperative to develop a new SEO strategy and inbound marketing campaign.
