How do I rename a domain and preserve SEO?

How do I rename a domain and preserve SEO? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, domains, pagerank, to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about How do I rename a domain and preserve SEO?.Problem :

As part of graduating from Area51 and becoming a full fledged site we sometimes change domain names from http://topic.stackexchange.com to http://example.com. Aside from the obvious 301 redirect rules to support existing urls transparently, are there other techniques that would aid in the preservation of SEO?

Solution :

Check out Google's guide to moving a site:

• Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site.


• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site and make sure they are updated to point to the new domain (obviously, for external links this is difficult)


• Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site's move.


• We recommend that you create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.

After the move, sanity checks to make sure things are working:

• Check the web crawl errors for both your old and new sites, to make sure that the 301 redirects from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn't showing unwanted 404 errors.


• If you've submitted a Sitemap, the Sitemap Details page lets you see how many URLs in your Sitemap we've crawled and indexed.

Esp. the Change of Address tool might be of interest.

I didn't read the link above, but no doubt that http 301 "permanent" redirects will be important to preserving both bookmarks and search ranking.

I'm sure this is covered in the google doc that jmb referenced, but:

• Tell google your site has moved using Google Webmaster Central


• Set something up on the old site to return a 301 redirect for EVERY individual url on the old site to the corresponding url on the new site, I imagine this would be some effort but would probably also be the most effective

If the issue about seo, domains, pagerank, is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.