How to move the site: 10 stages of moving the site

You create a website with the goal that it won a leading position in its niche or began to generate income, justifying the cost of its maintenance. But what happens when the site does not justify itself or it becomes so valuable that a competitor buys it? How does the process of closing a site, its transfer or merger?

Search Engine Watch : We had to deal with this last month. And SEW readers know that AOL has closed Propeller.com, and The World of Warcraft has moved from WOW.com to wow.joystiq.com. Here are some SEO recommendations from our experience.

Moving the site to another domain

This is one of the simplest forms of site relocation. When changing the main domain, all you need to do is put 301 redirects at the domain level.

However, if the changes concern not only the domain, but the change of the CMS site or the linking structure, then this process is somewhat more complicated.

Change CMS / Merge with another site

Here you have to arrange redirects at various levels, possibly at the level of individual pages. Do I have to redirect every page? Perhaps not, but it all depends on many factors.

Think about the following:

• What pages bring traffic?
• What pages convert traffic?
• What pages have backlinks?
• Which pages attract users the most?

This meant that the developers needed to “pull out” all the records from the old CMS, transfer them to the AOL CMS and specify the paths to each page from the old URLs. Some segments of the old site were determined impractical, based on the criteria presented above and therefore were not transferred at all.

Site closure

One of the most traffic-bearing sections of the site was an article on women's health. This particular page was more than two years old, but it still occupied the first positions in search results. Therefore, we had to install a redirect from one page.

We’ve identified a page on the AOL (Health) network that would satisfy users ’requests and they wouldn’t be confused by what the hell they were forwarded to the wrong page they were looking for.

Of course, this page of the AOL site would eventually take a leading position in search results and start bringing traffic to the site, but by setting 301 redirects we did it instantly.

10 stages of site transfer

Regardless of the reasons for transferring the site, we follow 10 steps of this process:

• Before you take any action on the transfer, consult with the SEO team in order to save as much traffic as possible.
• Do not use one redirect of all pages leading to one page, section or URL of a new site.
• Use the 301 page-to-page model redirect and this will save the maximum amount of traffic.
• Before you start the transfer test each section of the site. The transfer should begin only when you are sure that the new pages will match the requirements of the users.
• Use a temporary 301 to each old page, redirecting it to a new one.
• Try to keep the same folder structure, for more simple and clear putting down redirects when changing the domain.
• Recheck all external and internal links. Try to change all the links by changing them to new ones.
• Continue to monitor the old domain and maintain redirects for at least 180 days.
• Create an error page 404. When an error occurs, it will help users navigate to the new site.
• In the webmasters' panel, confirm both domains, since when you search the sites again with a search engine, you will probably find errors (including redirects) and you can easily fix them.

By following our recommendations, you will mitigate the losses caused by the site’s “relocation,” which means that after the site has been transferred, you will not have to work for months to return to the previous traffic level.