Change of domain procedure

[SimpsonGareth]

Hi Guys,

I have been tasked with conducting a change of domain for our company website. The website will be exactly the same, just  change from www.jamesburfield.co.uk to www.burfieldcreative.co.uk.

This was attempted before but my boss got cold feet and switched back after he saw a drop in rankings. (He put in the redirects and went through the change of domain procedure with google).

I have told him that I think its possible with minimal disruption and we have agreed even with some disruption it will better in the long run for the company.

Here is the process I intend to follow:

1. Copy and upload site to new domain

2. Redirect all pages with a wildcard or individually - possibly drop the www also

3. Follow the change of domain procedure in webmaster tools

4. Change the href of as many as possible back links to point at the new domain

Please let me know your thoughts on my plan and if there is anything else I can do to ensure we maintain our rankings.

Any help is appreciated as this is my suggestion and my neck is on the line!

Thanks guys!

Gareth

[Keszi]

Hi Gareth,

There is a very good article about this @Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

You can check that.

I hope it will help,

Istvan

[tylerfraser]

make sure your 301s are in place.

use seomoz crawler as well as google

search site:domain.com and see if any of the pages shouldn't be coming up or if 404s are there

use linksleuth (pc) to look at all the links in your site

make sure you dont change too much on the new site and keep it as close to the old as possible

keep title tags, content and number of links on pages as close to the old as possible - if not the same.

keep coming back to the forum with new questions.

[SimpsonGareth]

We have made the change!

http://burfieldcreative.co.uk/

We have put the redirects in place and carried out the domain change procedure with google. If anybody can check everything is in order  that would be most appreciated.

Thanks for all your advice.