Changing a domain name
Last week I was asked by one of my customers to change the domain name on one of his websites. I explained to him why this was not a good idea, but he was adamant that it had to be done. So how do you do it properly?
First, re-set up the website using the new domain name.
Second, you change all the backlinks to the old website to point to the new website. However, this is almost impossible in most cases as you do not have control over all the websites that link to your website and many of them will not respond to requests for changes.
Third, you need to tell all the users of your website that the address has changed. This includes search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Realistically, stages 2 and 3 above are impossible, so the next best thing is to redirect all the traffic from the old website addresses to the new ones. This can be done (and indeed Google state that this is the best way to do it) using a “server-side 301 redirect”.
The redirect part is self-explanatory – traffic that visits an old web address is redirected to the new web address – but what does the 301 bit mean? The 301 “status code” tells the visitor that a page has moved permanently to a new location. This will not mean much to a casual human browser, but it will mean a great deal to the search engines. Search engines will begin to give priority to the new site over the old one and “understand” that the old addresses have been superseded by the new ones.
Next week, I will explain how to actually implement a 301 redirect.
