What are the repercussions of switching a domain?

[liamvansteps]

We have recently switched the calgaryhomepros.com domain, which used to be a point2 site, to our current site, which is hosted by a Real Estate webpage hosting company called Redman. When we replaced the domain for the Redman site, the old point2 site stopped existing, and because the link structure didn’t line up perfectly to the new host, there were a bunch of 404 error pages which rank high-ish in the SERP. My question is, outside of manually redirecting the high ranking 404 pages to our current site, what can I do to improve my SEO in this situation? Is there anything else I should be doing, and is this hurting my SEO drastically?

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi liamvansteps,

Switching your domain is equivalent to moving your business from one physical location to another. If you don't tell people you've moved, they'll show up at the old address and not find you. Your SEO equity (like your mail) won't be forwarded.

You need to provide human and robotic site visitors with the equivalent of a "change of address" in the form of 301 redirects and updated sitemaps. And just like you'd probably want to tell your friends and best customers directly about the move (and not just rely on a change of address), you will want to update some accounts like social media, Moz (of course), Google My Business, and others.

What are the repercussions of not doing this? You'll lose credit for any accumulated link equity and domain reputation metrics gathered by search engines. You'll effectively be wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch.

How do you switch domains and maintain the status quo?

Search the Moz site for phrases like "how to switch domains" and you'll find lots of helpful step-by-step information shared by others. I don't want to repeat any of that here.

[matt-elshaw]

Hi,

Launching a new website on your domain can be challenging, especially from an SEO perspective. There are a lot of things that need to be "ticked off" before you press the launch button. I understand that your new website is already live, so I'll adjust my recommendations below based on that to try and help:

1. Ensure that Google Analytics and any other tracking codes from your old website have been copied across to the new site. You can use the wayback machine to check the code of your old website if you have lost any of these.
2. Complete technical checks on things like:
   a) www and non-www versions - do they redirect correctly?
   b) Is there an XML sitemap in place? Has it been resubmitted in Google Search Console?
   c) Is the new website mobile friendly?
   d) Check page speed
   e) Is the site launching on HTTPS? Are redirects setup correctly?
   f) Are canonical tags in place?
   g) Test web forms and ensure they work correctly
   h) Check for any 404 errors in Google Search Console
   i) Ensure NOINDEX and robots.txt block is removed on the new website
   j) Request a recrawl in Google Search Console
   k) Ensure any Goals in GA are reconfigured to work on the new site
   l) Add an annotation in GA to mark the launch of the new site
3. Recreate any high ranking/high traffic pages from your old website. Open Google Analytics and select a date range for 2-3 months BEFORE your new website went live. Have a look at the top landing pages on your website. For pages that were generating a significant amount of organic traffic, ensure they are replicated as closely as possible on your new website (including meta tags).
4. For other pages on the new website, ensure content and meta tags have been optimised. If this was done previously on your old website, you can copy across your previous meta tags and look at modifying your content.
5. Using the same method in point 3, get a list of URLS from your old website and ensure they all 301 redirect to your new URL structures on a page level.

Hope this helps!
Thanks
Matt