One of many things that we discuss with our clients is rebuilding their websites to reflect the new image of their company. Normally, these design and content changes are accompanied by a domain name change. Obviously, no one wants to lose the traffic that comes from the search engine high rankings and to start doing the SEO work from scratch neglecting the effort that was invested in ranking the original website. In order make the transition seamless and to follow Google's best practises advice we recommend taking the following steps:
1. Move the website from the old domain to the new one before doing any content or design changes. It is important to consider ALL of these factors:
$newDomain="http://superiorwebsys.com"; //your new domain name$innerPageURI=$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; // this variable contains inner page path
header("Location: ".$newDomain.$innerPageURI); // the actual 301 redirect function
exit();
?>
2. Check that all the redirects are done properly and that you do not come across "Page not found" errors.
3. Wait and make sure that Google indexes all or at least most of your new domain pages instead of your old ones by doing the following search in Google:
site:www.superiorwebsys.com
where www.superiorwebsys.com is your new domain name. Once, Google has indexed all your new domain pages your can confidently start changing the structure of your old website on the new domain.
Associated tags: Web, Internet, Website, Design, SEO, Google, Search Engines, Server, Apache, Content, Domain, 301, 301 Redirect, Redirect