The document discusses best practices for moving a website from one domain to another. It recommends evaluating the need for a domain change, considering the nature of the move (full or partial transfer), expecting indexing delays of 1-4 months, registering the new domain properly, using 301 redirects, reaching out to referring sites and backlink partners, and maintaining redirects for an extended period. The goal is to minimize ranking and traffic losses during the domain transfer process.

1. INTERACTIVE STRATEGY - 55, AV. MONT-ROYAL W., SUITE 999, MONTREAL (QC) H2T 2S6 T 514.524.7149 NVISOLUTIONS.COM HOW TO MOVE A SITE From one domain to another (and minimize the damage done...)

2. PROCESS OVERVIEW A quick overview of what you’ll need to consider and do when changing domains: Pre-Move > Need Vs. Risk in Switching Domain Names > Nature of the move (whole or partial transfer, etc) > What to expect in terms of indexing time and rankings > Registration of the domain and the IP neighbourhood THE Move > Prepping XML sitemaps > Duplicate content issues during the move > Nature of URL / URI changes > Moving the content – Caveats for databases > 301 Redirections Post-Move > Reviewing referring sites and backlink profile > Launching with a bang > What to do with the old site INTERACTIVE STRATEGY – NVISOLUTIONS.COM

3. NEED VS. RISK The first question you should ask yourself when changing domain names is: > Do I really need to change domain names? > No really... REALLY?? Is this the brilliant brain-child of some marketing exec who has no clue of how the Internet works? Most domain name changes come about due to business reasons. If the reason for a name change is weak, and the previous domain is strong, or a lot of your business relies on search engines, tell your boss (or yourself): > Rankings are inevitably going to drop temporarily > Chances are when rankings return, they won’t be as strong as they were before > There is a fair amount of work involved > There is a fair amount of risk that work won’t be done right > If it’s not done right rankings might tank for months and months INTERACTIVE STRATEGY – NVISOLUTIONS.COM

4. THE NATURE OF THE MOVE ‘ Moving’ your site could mean a number of things: > Shifting to a new domain and transferring all content > Shifting to a new domain and transferring partial content > Splitting off some content to a new domain for PR or marketing purposes > Shifting to a new domain and changing URI structure > Shifting to a new domain and changing content In each case the process as a whole is similar, but the details of how you deal with the content shift will be different. The difference come into play when deploying 301 redirects to the new site. Another panellist will describe 301 shortly. INTERACTIVE STRATEGY – NVISOLUTIONS.COM

6. REGISTERING THE NEW DOMAIN When registering a new domain, always: > Ensure the domain is entirely new, or if it was registered previously that it did not host questionable content (use Archive.org ) > Ensure that the IP address you will be hosted on is either exclusive, or does not host any sites which contain questionable content (Use: http://www.seoegghead.com/tools/what-is-hosted-on-that-ip.seo ) Some recommend registering your new domain for more than two years, and using the same registrant details as the previous, established domain, to avoid any issue. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz recommends publically stating the intention to move on Google Group’s Webmaster Central forum, where you can go back to complain if Google is not quick to recognize the new domain. INTERACTIVE STRATEGY – NVISOLUTIONS.COM

7. THE MOVE > Before any content is moved to the new domain, temporarily block search engines from indexing with Robots.txt: User Agent: * Disallow: / > Ensure both old and new domains are registered and verified with Google Webmaster Tools > Ensure both old and new sites have complete XML sitemaps submitted and verified in Google Webmaster Tools > Move the content to the new domain – Caveats for databases, as discussed in the previous presentation > Set 301 redirects from old domain to new, as discussed in detail in the presentation following this one > At the same time the 301s go live, remove the Robots.txt block on crawlers INTERACTIVE STRATEGY – NVISOLUTIONS.COM