Friday, October 23, 2015

Domain Relocation Guidelines To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

Re-branding your company name is one of the most common and toughest marketing initiatives for businesses across world, and can occur at any time for variety of reasons. Whether it is an effort to dissociate with the performance of the past or to simplify the brand name of your company for future, this marketing tactic can be very successful if approached properly.
Some notable brands have undergone this process including Hutchison’s rebranding to Vodafone, and the Federal Express rebranding to FedEx. In the digital world, Google rebranded from their original name, BackRub.

SEO Ranking Preservation
SEO Ranking Preservation can be a broad term that may include a variety of performance indicators including page-rank, traffic, ranking keywords, online purchases, bookings, and many more. When SEO Ranking preservation is not a key factor throughout domain migration or the URL restructuring process, there are some key lessons that can be learned. As search engine optimizers, we understand that often other factors like time-resources, budget, other marketing efforts, or even client buy-in to the SEO process may inhibit the preservation process. Brands that have failed at this process chose to focus on other priorities during their website migration process, and unfortunately, as a result they have seen dramatic dips in their site performance.

Another “frightening scenario” for SEO is to have domain migration occur so that both domains remain live for some time and links connect the old and new sites back and forth. To avoid this, coordinate the shift all at once because the existence of two live domains with substantial amounts of duplicate content and partial implementation of redirects will send conflicting signals to search engines about which site should rank. Consequently, the domain authority is then split instead of shifted from the old domain to the new one. In some cases we’ve seen domain authority drops for both the old and the new domain.
Re-brandings with SEO Ranking Preservation in Mind
What are the precautions do you need to plan ahead for, in order to minimize the chance of these re-branding drops impacting your business?
There are 6 significant components to maintaining domain authority, digital presence, and accurate tracking of the domain migration. Some of which impact how the domain is perceived and some are related to how the migration is tracked. Keep in mind these significant elements if you are planning for a re-branding:
1)Redirects
The most apparent first step is to put in place redirects which automatically route a user from the old domain and page to the new one. There are a range of types of redirects that are available, but for these types of redirects, a 301 is best. A 301 status communicates to search engines and web browsers that the page has been permanently relocated and redirects the user to the correct page. A 301 redirect also transfers ranking power (sometimes called “link juice”) that the legacy page had built up to the new page.
In order to identify every page on the site that needs to be redirected, several tools, including Screaming Frog, Integrity for Mac, are available to “crawl” the legacy site. Pay special consideration to URLs that have the most in-bound links, or receive the highest volume of inbound traffic from other sites. These pages are home to most of the site’s “link juice” and must be maintained. Tools such as Google Search Console, MozOpenSite Explorer and Majestic SEO, can be used to compare and make sure that nothing gets skipped or overlooked.
Once the list of legacy pages is complete they must be mapped to pages on the new site and redirected. A simple way to help you do this is to create an excel file listing the old URL’s in one column and the new ones in another. It also helps for verification purposes later.
It’s important to be prepared to make all of the changes at once instead of drifting a handful of pages at a time. Leaving both domains live sends conflicting signals to search engines and can damage the domain authority of both the legacy and new domains.
2)Resubmit Sitemap
Once the redirects have been implemented it’s vital to notify Google and Bing Webmaster Tools that a change of address is happening. Leave the old site’s XML sitemap live for about a week after the migration because crawling never happen immediately to your sitemap so crawlers can still access it, follow the links therein through the 301 redirects, and start working the old URLs out of their indexes.
Create a XML sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. Typically, it can take a day or two before the new crawl takes effect and you can compare the number of indexed pages once the crawling happen. You can access crawling information from your webmaster tool.
3)Directory Listings
Along with inbound links, one more significant factor to consider is directory listings are one of top sources used by both search engines and users to find a website or domain. It’s considered best SEO practice to make certain that listings in online and print directories are current and accurate. A domain migration requires returning to all of the directories that list the legacy domain and updating them to reflect the new address. These directories may include (most generically) Yep, FourSquare, InfoGroup, Localeze, Yellowpages, and DMOZ. An aggregation tool like MozLocal can help bring all of these directories into alignment.
In addition to the generic directories most businesses have an opportunity to be listed in industry-specific directories. From real estate-agents to Dentists or home maintenance professionals, you’ll likely find a set of available directories. The longer a legacy domain has been in existence, the more directories that will subsequently need to be updated.
4)Social Media
Now as we are into this Digital world there is a strong correlation between social media engagement and web traffic. Announcing and publicizing the domain name change to provide important social signals and promote the re-branding in its own right. This will generate higher than usual volumes of traffic to the new domain in order to compensate for the potential drop in organic traffic while Google is indexing the new domain. While it isn’t critical to update all legacy posts with a new domain, it’s crucial to make sure that any pages that have social media links to them are correctly redirected. Update social media profiles, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google +, but don’t neglect LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, Pinterest,  Stumblr, YouTube and any others that are connected to the website.
5)Analytics and Search Console Profiles
The profiles in an analytics package, whether it is Google Analytics or a third party fee-for-service provider, will track the traffic to a specific domain, and if it’s set up correctly should not be tracking activity on other domains. In the Admin tab of Google Analytics, the property name and default URL should be updated to reflect the new domain. This is also the time to annotate Google Analytics in order to track the date of the migration.
In addition to Google Analytics it's important to update settings in Google Search Console, only AFTER the migration has occurred.

6)Audit Redirects
Once everything is complete, it’s important to verify that everything is working as expected. The Screaming Frog web spider tool can help run an audit of the old and new site to examine the results.
A). Upload: The legacy URL’s
Switch the SEO Spider to ‘List Mode,” select the file with all the old URLs to audit and upload.
B). Select: The ‘Always Follow Redirects’ box
Navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab inside the ‘Spider Configuration’ and select the ‘Always Follow Redirects‘ option.
As default ‘List Mode’ works at a 0 crawl depth, meaning it just crawls the URLs included in the upload. With this feature selected, it ignores depth and will follow redirects until the final destination (a no response, 2XX, 4XX or 5XX etc.).
C). Start the crawl
Now hit the ‘Start’ button let the SEO Spider crawl the site, reach 100%, and come to a stop.
D). Click on ‘Reports’ & ‘Redirect Chains’
This report does not just include URLs which have redirect chains, it includes every URL in the original upload and the response in a single export. If a URL has multiple redirects in a chain, this export will map out each hop along the way, redirect 1, to redirect 2, to redirect 3, and all the responses along the way until the final target. It will also show how many hops there are (remember 5+ Google might give up and treat as a 404) and identify any pesky redirect loops.
This report provides a comprehensive method to audit all redirects in a site migration in a nice, easy, single export.
Effective Domain Migration To Preserve Search Engine Rankings
While there are a lot of steps in this process and many intricate details to pay attention to, we at IBIS can defiantly help you out with this preparation and a clearly outlined plan. Sometimes it can be possible to identify unexpected behavior or disparities before they have a notable impact on traffic and visitors. So for that expert services of professional can guide you well. Following the steps to update analytic packages and audit redirects will help identify opportunities to make changes before they become problems.
If you have any questions, please contact us.

No comments:

Post a Comment