Occasionally I get a call from a client who wants to modify their domain name but they don’t want to lose their organic search engine position. Say you have a company, 123.com, and you’ve been performing well in search engines for awhile and you decide to change the domain name to 1-2-3.com for whatever reason. A search engine notices that a new company 1-2-3.com contains identical content to 123.com and it doesn’t understand that its the same site. In a search engines logic, someone just copied over all of your content and is hosting it at a new domain name. In this case search engines will only honor the older content and will completely dismiss the site that it thinks is stealing the content. The question is, how do you tell the search engine that you are simply moving to a new hosting spot, a new name, but you are still the same company.
The solution is called a 301 Redirect. This is a piece of code that you place in your old site, in our example it would be in the 123.com site. In that redirect file you write a code rules that tells the search engines that the site has moved and here are the correct pages that are replacing the old ones. The logic looks something like this:
123.com/oldpage-1 –> 1-2-3.com/newpage-name1
123.com/oldpage-2 –> 1-2-3.com/newpage-name2
and so forth…
Do you need help making any serious changes with your old web site? Contact me and lets setup a plan!