If you need to change the domain

Sometimes there is an urgent need to change the site domain . There can be many reasons: from a change in the geography of the company's activities, to the acquisition of a full-fledged .UA domain, if the company was able to register its trademark. But what to do if the old domain was widely optimized, had search traffic and even some indicators in the form of TIC and PR? There is only one way out - to set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one, and we will talk about how to do it correctly in this article.

First of all, we must prepare an existing site for moving to a new place of residence. To do this, you will need to create the latest sitemap, 404 page with information and a link to the new domain.

At the same time, we need to launch a site on a new domain, create accounts in Yandex.Webmaster and Google Webmaster , and transfer content from the old domain to the new one. It is important that all actions on the old and new versions of the site are not too far apart in time. It is highly desirable to complete all the work during the day.

So, only now you can enable 301 redirects of all pages of the site to a new domain and immediately after that perform some manipulations. You should add the old sitemap in .xml format to Google and Yandex - this will give a signal that all pages of the site are redirected to a new address. Accordingly, you need to upload a site map located on a new domain to new accounts on Yandex and Google .

On this, the move can be completed and it remains only to wait for the new domain to enter the index of search engines, take the appropriate positions, PR and TCI will flow from the old domain. Unfortunately, this process can be lengthy and you will have to put up with some losses in search traffic. However, if you decide to move to a new domain , then the reasons for this will probably outweigh all temporary difficulties.