Pre-check before moving
- Check if you have canonical tags in place and if no, add canonical tags to the website.
- Check the redirections (http to https? subdomain?)
- Verify the new website in google search console and check if it wasn’t penalized by visiting “manual action” & “removed urls”.
Duplicate the website
- Don’t be scared to duplicate the website on the new domain name
- Don’t change the theme after duplicating the website. Wait for several months before changing your theme.
- The former website should also be verified.
Set up the 301 redirects
- Create 301 redirects in HTaccess file or something similar
- Create two exceptions: robots.txt and sitemap.xml should not be redirected.
- The redirection directives should be in place before any other directives.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sitemap.xml$RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
Use the change address tool
- Check if everything is fine using “fetch as google” in the Google search console with the former domain name and the new domain name.
- Go to search console and click on the former domain name
- Click the gear icon and click “change address tool”
- Choose the new domain name and validate the change of address
Post move tasks
- After some months, I do encourage to drop the old links.
Reference at Google: