SEO threats of moving from [.com.au] domain to [.com] domain for a 15yr old SAAS company.

[allanhenryjohn]

Hey Guys.

I work for a 15 yr old SAAS company which originally started with a country-specific [.com.au] domain and later got a [.com] domain as the business grew. The AU website has a DA:56 while the [.com] has as DA: 25. Now we are looking to have everything migrated to the [.com] domain.

But, my concern is that we might lose the SEO value of the AU domain. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in this or recommend a case study on this topic.

Thanks!

Allan

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Based on my experience I can tell you that you minimize the drops in traffic and visibility but you can not avoid it. There are many site migration types. It all depends on the nature of the changes that take place.

• Site location changes
• Platform changes
• Content changes
• Structural changes
• Design changes

Your case is a site location or domain migration. Google’s documentation mostly covers migrations with site location changes, which are categorized as follows:

• Site moves with URL changes
• Site moves without URL changes

First, need to prepare a migration plan. First of all, need to run an audit for your site, in my opinion, Screamingfrog or Raven Tool are the best options to perform this task.

• Site structure
• Content
• Internal Links
• Search Console, Google Analytics and Tag Manager

**_Split your move into smaller steps. _**I recommend initially moving just a piece of the site to test any effects on traffic and search indexing. After that, you can move the rest of your site all at once or in chunks. Also keep in mind that while moving just one section is a great way to test your move, it's not necessarily representative of a whole site move when it comes to search. The more pages that you move, the more likely you'll encounter additional problems to solve. Careful planning can minimize problems.

**Time your move to coincide with lower traffic **If your traffic is seasonal or dips on certain weekdays, it makes sense to move your site during traffic lulls. This lowers the impact of anything that breaks and also dedicates more of your server’s power to helping Googlebot update our index.

Expect temporary fluctuation  With any significant change to a site, you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and re-indexes your site. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move in our index; larger sites can take longer. The speed at which Googlebot discover and process URLs largely depends on the number of URLs and your server speed. Submitting a sitemap can help make the discovery process quicker, and it's fine to move your site in sections. If it involves a URL change, you might consider an A/B test or trial run.

A quick tip that nobody will mention. Starts to build links to your new domain before the migration.

• Search Console Migration https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
• Google Analytics Migration https://torpedogroup.com/blog/post/google-analytics-changing-domains

Regards and Good Luck

[MikeTek]

Hi Allan,

A lot of this depends on what else will be changing in this process outside of the domain name.

Probably the best and most detailed case study of such a domain migration was featured here at Moz: https://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

Individual experience varies and is always anecdotal (what happened in one or even 10 examples doesn't necessarily predict what will happen with your site). I've seen both cases where this goes fairly smoothly and cases where Google seems to ignore some portion of the link equity acquired to the old domain resulting in a net loss of traffic.

There is plenty to look out for here, but if your site platform, information architecture, content, etc are all remaining static during the domain change (recommended), primarily you're going to want to ensure you don't lose any link equity in the process by setting a global page-level redirect with 301 response codes and that all of your tracking and configurations in platforms like Google Search Console are set up properly for the new domain. On that note, you'll also want to use the "Change of Address" tool within Search Console when you make this change.

This post from Builtvisible provides some helpful detail on how to approach the redirection process - but as above, if the site is otherwise remaining static, you should be able to handle this with a global patter-matched redirect (vs the painstaking process of setting page-to-page redirects).

Where possible, if you can have links pointing to your site (on other sites) updated to reflect the new TLD, that'd be ideal.

After the migration, I'd recommend you pull a list of your top linked pages from Moz Link Explorer, AHREFS or similar, crawl the full list and ensure that the redirects are firing properly (301 response codes, single-hop redirects and the final destination URL is valid/live on the new site).

Overall, this is one of those gray areas in SEO - it's a sensitive process and I would expect a period of traffic drops as Google crawls and indexes your new pages and attributes PageRank to them properly.

Best of Luck,
Mike

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Very useful answer Mike Tekula