Lecture
Over the past few years we have had to cooperate with many organizations that have decided to change the domain for their sites. The first question they asked sounded like this: “How much traffic will we lose after switching to a new domain?”.
A good question, at the same time it is difficult to answer, but in my article I will try to do it and explore this question more deeply.
Below are some of the changes that may have an impact on the position of your site in search results or on the amount of traffic.
These are any changes in the spelling of a domain name, for example, the transition from the domain www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com.
The most common reason why they do this is branding changes for the same type of business. An existing business can rebrand, or one company has swallowed up another, and as a result of this merger, it was decided to combine the sites of both companies.
These are changes when content that is posted on a page with a URL on old-domain.com (for example, about-us.html) goes to another URL (for example, about-us.php).
Changes to the URL structure can be of this type:
Structural changes often occur due to technological changes in the site's engine.
For example, before the site worked on the CMS "Cold Fusion", and then decided to switch to ASP. Another possible reason for a "total" structural change is a complete update of the content, when you therefore need to make changes to the URLs.
Changes to the content on the page can be made without changing the URL of the page, just rewrite the content on the page. As in the previous case, changes in site content can be classified as:
Content may change for many reasons. Perhaps the target audience has changed. Perhaps there have been changes in the marketing company of the site owner’s company, and therefore they were forced to completely replace the content.
Each of these changes can occur independently of the others. For example, you can change the content without changing the domain address, or change the URL of the pages without changing the content.
It is a fact. Even if you simply changed the domain, and saved the content and address structure, anyway, you lose some percentage of the traffic.
The easiest way to minimize the loss of traffic is to use a 301 redirect to redirect each URL address from the old domain to the new one, thus you would indicate to the search engines that the new URL addresses are of high importance.
In general, a banal domain change should not provoke a significant drop in traffic. Most importantly, it goes the loss of "trust". Each change in the domain can serve as a signal to search engines to change the owner of the site, even if the WhoIs data remained the same. Search engines reduce the credibility of the site after a domain change, since in their opinion the new owner cannot enjoy the trust that the previous one has earned.
Another factor directly concerns 301 redirects. The experiments that we carried out in our company clearly showed that 301 redirects convey the majority, but not all, of the reference weight for a new page of destination.
Sometimes there is a delay between events, when you redirect and search engines start transmitting reference weight, during this period the amount of traffic from search engines can drop significantly. In the medium and long term, a simple change in the domain is not so expensive (although there are exceptions here too). You can lose from 20% to 40% of your traffic in the short term, and from 10% to 20% in the medium and long term.
For example, a simultaneous change of the domain and URL structure may cost much more for your site. With complex changes, search engines trust your site less and the action plan for 301 redirects becomes much more difficult.
If you still decide to change the domain and URL structure of your site, then expect a drop in traffic from 30% to 50% in the short term, and a gradually lower drop in the medium and long term.
Well, the last possible scenario, you change your domain, the entire URL structure of your site, all the content, then you have huge problems. The main problem is that new content is not something that people are used to seeing on your site, even if your new content is completely the same, anyway, your site has lost its “face”.
As a result of such changes, search engines will take very little weight on your links. Loss of traffic will be about 50% in the entire time range.
This table is a summary of all the above:
Note! These figures are relative and should not be perceived as final and exact, they can vary both upwards and downwards.
The real impact of changes on your site depends on a large number of factors, and I simply cannot consider all of them in this article.
Also, this table does not provide that you have built up a large link mass to improve the position of your site. Darkness, very naive to hope for it.
As soon as you have made all the necessary changes and have done everything that the search engine recommends in such cases, the most that you can do is to continue building up new and high-quality links.
Especially if the rate at which you increase the number of incoming links does not fall, but rather grows, then this will be a very good signal for search engines that with new changes you are doing better than before, which by itself has a positive effect on your ranking.
Also, do not forget to contact the webmasters of the sites where links to your site were placed before the changes, and ask them to correct your links so that they go straight to your new site bypassing the old one with a 301 redirect.
If the majority of webmasters do this, then this step will be a good signal for search engines that your site has not lost its credibility and trust after all the changes that have occurred.
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seo, smo, monetization, basics of internet marketing
Terms: seo, smo, monetization, basics of internet marketing