Tips to move your site to new domain.

Ok,you want to move your site to new domain then, here are some tips that will help you retain your site’s ranking in Google’s search results.

Whatever may be the reason for switching to a new domain either for branding or redesigning, your aim is SEO and traffic which you  don’t wanted to lose and also to avoid 404 Error(File Not Found) when a user visits your site.

1. Use Google Webmaster to tell Google about your new URL. Google will update your index to reflect your new URL.

• On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
• Under Site configuration, click Change of address.
• In Step 4, in the Select a verified site list, select the new site.

2.  Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site. This tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved.

NOTE: We recommend that you move and redirect a section or directory first,and then test to make sure that your redirects are working correctly before moving all your content.

3. Don’t do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. It’s more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve  your site’s ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users.

4. Check both external and internal links to pages on your old site.Ask other Webmasters of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain or you can set redirection for all  those pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site.

5. To prevent confusion among users,at least retain your old website for 3 months.

6. Create and submit sitemap to Google webmaster in site configuration.

7. Use free tools to find Broken links like Xenu, or  W3C  Link Checker.

8. Update your RSS Feed: When you move from one domain to another, the address of your RSS feed will change as well.So here is a simple solution go to Blogger -> Settings -> Site Feed, type the address of your new Domain RSS feed there and thus your old RSS feed will automatically move to your new feed.

9. Once the search bots and users start visiting to your new site, you may update the homepage of your old website stating that your site is now moved permanently to new address with links to some of your best posts.

Note: After submitting the change of address, check your Webmaster Tools data periodically to see if your new site has been crawled and indexed (if you have a Sitemap, one way to determine this is by checking Sitemap details for the new site to see how many of the pages have been crawled and indexed).