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Guide to a (hopefully) successful 301 – Update: 301 FAIL
I just made a major change for me and 301′d PatrickGavin.com to Searchengineoptimization.net The focus of this site moving forward will be more of a SEO resource than my personal blog so I wanted a name that says this loud and clear. I wanted to kick off the new site (new design coming soon btw) with a quick guide on how to properly 301 a domain. If you would have done anything differently please let me know in the comments! In the end, the judge will be Google and how it handles this 301.
Goal is to 301 redirect www.abc.com to www.123.com
1. Register both www.abc.com and www.123.com with Google webmaster tools. Note that you will have to insert a snippet of code or upload a file to both of your sites to verify you do own or control both websites.
2. Make sure www.123.com takes on the exact design, look and feel, etc of the original www.abc.com site. This is important as Google doesn’t like too much change going on at once. Keep the design the same during a 301 so you don’t throw too much change at Google at once.
3. Make sure you keep the url structure the same, ie www.patrickgavin.com/2009/04/19/april-sandbox-update/ should be moved to www.searchengineoptimization.net/2009/04/19/april-sandbox-update/
4. Follow Google’s steps technical guidelines on completing a 301
5. Double check your redirects. Use a 301 redirect checker to make sure your redirects are seo friendly (http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/). Also, test a handful of urls from your old domain to make sure they are getting redirected properly. You can easily do this by googling your old domain name and clicking through your sites indexed pages. Be very sure that every single page of your old domain is getting redirected to another active page at your new domain. You definitely don’t want to be left with a bunch of 404 not founds. Additionally, it is recommended that you chose to redirect everything to either the www or non-www version of your new domain.
6. Let Google Webmaster Tools know about the 301 by submitting a "Change of Address" request.
7. After the 301, it is highly recommended you build some strong links and add some content to the blog to show the site is still active & growing. If you want to go further, have some of your old incoming links update their link to point to the new site (this is not required, but it shows that the sites that linked to you before still want to link to you now indicating it’s the same site as before). Remember Google logs redirects just like they log your backlink data so don’t rely on 301’s as your sole link strategy.
8. Wait patiently and have some faith! Your original site can disappear for a period of time from Google’s index leaving you with NOTHING for a period of time. This could be days or weeks. What should happen is the new site you 301′d to should appear taking on similar rankings that you had for your original site give or take a few spots up or down.
Now we will wait and see what happens with my 301 and I will keep you updated. The PatrickGavin.com domain is currently ranking #6 for the coveted "search engine optimization" query so this is a bit of a gamble and it will be fun to see if it pays off!
UPDATE! +3 days after the 301. My PatrickGavin.com site has lost all Google keyword rankings! I have lost all rankings including #1 for "patrick gavin" #6 for "search engine optimization", etc. Here is the good news: this is what happens when you do a 301. Fingers crossed but the SearchEngineOptimization.net domain should* reappear in the coming days/weeks…
Update #2 – I should have updated this a while ago but the 301 attempt did not take! I waited about 30 days and the 301 went no where. Basically lost rankings for both sites. Because of this I removed the 301 and the good news is about a week later all my rankings returned to my PatrickGavin.com site. I have done a number of 301’s with these same steps and it worked flawlessly so I don’t think the steps are flawed. The good news is I removed the 301 and I am right back where I started so nothing lost there and I may* try the 301 again in the future and see if it sticks.
Ha! You blogged.
About to launch the mother of all redirect projects next month, so this is timely. The only thing I would add is that before doing one of these, it’s a great time to assess content metrics and maybe let some of the bullshit die off forever. I start with a list of everything that had an inbound link or met other content metrics and redirect just that stuff rather than a whole site.
Love the domain.
Provo, good to hear from you bro! Been a while, thought you got lost on Twitter and never worked anymore
Yeah would have been nice to snag searchengineoptimization.com but this was the next best so what the heck, should be a fun project. Next blog post: 2012
Great explanation. Cross fingers.
I’ve done a few of these this year and am involved in another right now. Climate seems okay.
Looks like you’ve got it under control, but why not highlight for your readers exactly what back links you prefer to your new domain, in case someone wants to help Google see the value of the new domain?
nice keywords in the domain, patrick!
hopefully it will prove to be worth the cost =8)
http://www.searchengineoptimization.net/ is 40 characters and http://www.searchengineoptimization.net is 20 syllables – wow!
i would suggest dropping four unnecessary characters and half the syllables (www.) since you are essentially starting from scratch.
since the hostname part of a url is case-insensitive you should use pascal casing whenever using your domain in a message – for branding and readability purposes – SearchEngineOptimization.net
you should also consider acquiring a short, brandable domain and rolling your own url shortener for social media purposes.
(email me if you would like some suggestions.)
for example, a url such as http://www.searchengineoptimization.net/2009/12/28/guide-to-a-hopefully-successful-301/ leaves only 52 characters for messaging and retweet space.
i would add a few of important points to your list for your faithful readers.
these don’t apply to your case as it appears you are already handling this well:
- make sure your domain and url canonicalization is in order – don’t forget to check for wildcard subdomains, ip address and default port specification.
- verify that all of your internal linking (and sitemap.xml for that matter) are referring to your new canonical domain.
- a sitewide redirect might be a good time to bite the bullet and consider going extensionless.
finally, it’s a good idea to investigate the backlink profile of a “new” domain and see if there are any “useful” inbound links you might want to take advantage of as well as anything troublesome you might want to be aware of.
there could also be some helpful clues in the “wayback machine”.
i forgot to mention you should take that nice smile to gravatar.com and sign up!
also, my “20 syllables” comment referred to what i submitted before the “http://” was automatically prepended.
my point is that “www.” is a speed bump when communicating your domain name.
Add some search/replace MySQL stuff
Dump all your old links into a Speadsheet somewhere as they won’t necessarily be appearing in Webmaster tools.
Try to get a few of the important ones changed
@ John Andrews, good idea! Will update post with that. Andy Beard, thanks for stopping by!
Great post, looking forward to the switch…curious if there is a strategy when the site has dynamic url structure, I ran into a similar problem recently when trying to redesign a customer website, they kept the same url, but essentially I lost all of the pages and links from the original site as the url structure was dyanmic and poorly coded.
I tried a couple of redirect strategies including the .htacess file without luck so I ended up just blocking the old paths via robots, not the best approach but it works minus the link juice effect.
The http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ is great! Im always having trouble with my 301 redirects, this is going to very helpful indeed! Thanks for the great post.
I found your post on how to construct a 301 redirect exceedingly useful and clear. Thanks.