My client wants to change domain name... Redirect help!

[donsilvernail]

Hello,

I have a client who wants to change domain names. The site is designed using WordPress, there are many plugins that will redirect links but they have to be same domain links. When I change the domain I would like to redirect all the old links to the same pages on the new url. How do I accomplish this? The plugin redirection or Yoast will not allow a redirect from one domain to another.

Thanks for any help on this matter. I have 200+ Urls to redirect.

[Mustansar]

Hi

Just simply use 301 redirect to your new domain; this will bring you not only the traffic of your existing site as well as the backlinks and juice of those back links to your site.
I believe, this will behave in the same manner with plugins based links as well.

Just make sure you follow the guidelines and you do it properly.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Donald,

The very best starting point is by reading the Google guides on moving a site.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

I don't actually know about plugins for Wordpress that will do this but your solution is going to lie around making the required changes in your .htaccess file. There is a lot of information out there on how best to do this, but this is what you need to be looking at.

-Andy

[donsilvernail]

Hi Ikkie,

do you mean a domain level redirect? such as hgt.com redirected to hgtnow.com and not worry about redirecting each link from their hgt.com/1 to their hgtnow.com/1 counterpart?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No, you need to redirect all URLs...

Have a read of this on using the change of address tool in Google.

• Set up server-side redirects (301-redirect directives) from your old URLs to the new ones. The Change of address tool won't function without it.

-Andy

[Mustansar]

Yes..it is domain level redirect you can achieve this through htacess file.

[LSIversen]

Hi Donald

If you're going to be doing this yourself, I'd read up on all the links posted by Andy and preferably find more on how to change domain names. If you don't do it properly your clients site can take a huge hit in visibility. You don't want that - trust me.

What I'd do is make a spreadsheet of every single URL on the old site and what that URL will be called on the new site. If you keep the site & URL structure the same, this should be fairly straightforward. But once you have your list, you should add them to your .htaccess to make sure you do a one-to-one redirect. That way the individual URLs should keep most of their juice and you minimize the losses.

But just be sure you know exactly what you're doing - otherwise it can hurt a lot more than it should.

[ThompsonPaul]

As long as the ONLY thing you're changing is the domain name (e.g. all URLS within WordPress will remain identical) the redirect process can be accomplished with a single rewrite rule in your site's htaccess file. There's no reason to write (or bog down your system with) a redirect for each individual page URL.

The configuration of this redirect will depend on whether the primary URL uses the www prefix or not, and whether it uses https.

In addition to the rewrite rule, you need to verify the new domain in Google Search Console (and transfer any preexisting disavow file to it if one existed for the old domain) as well as using the change of address tool to further inform Google of the change.

To help speed up the indexing of the new domain, it can be helpful to leave the old xml sitemap in place for a week or two so that search engines can more quickly discover the redirects. It's also beneficial to try to get at least some of the most powerful existing incoming links from other sites updated to point to the new domain. This takes direct outreach to the other site owners with the request, but it can help rescue some of the slight loss of ranking authority lost through the redirect, and is another good signal to Google of the change.

Finally, be sure you've updated the domain name in your Google Analytics account as well.

Hope that helps?

Paul