Question / Discussion Changing domain name

rninja

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How easy (or difficult) is it to move to a different domain name if you want to rebrand a website? I mean in terms of SEO, redirects, affiliate accounts and the whole lot.
 

Jon

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How easy (or difficult) is it to move to a different domain name if you want to rebrand a website? I mean in terms of SEO, redirects, affiliate accounts and the whole lot.

a bit of a pain but not impossible and with redirect the link juice can carry to the new site

Just so I can advise what are you doing

Buying New Domain > Installing wordpress and then copying the existing content over to the new site?
 

rninja

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Yeah that would be the plan.

Think I might need a more wide ranging domain name to branch in to other content.
 

Jon

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Ok so the way I've done it is

Don't know if you've got a reseller hosting account or whatever but

Buy Domain
Install Wordpress

Then you have options
If you have a lot of pages to export then you may wish to use WP Export Wordpress Plugin on the current site and WP Import on the new one to import

Or

You may want to ask your hosting company to move the database (or do it yourself via PHPMy Admin) to the new hosting space. You will the need to go into Wordpress and change permalinks . There are a number of guides on the Internet such as


Then once the content is on the new domain you want to use a redirect wordpress plugin on the old site where you can then give it the OLD URLs and the NEW URLs to go to.

Submit sitemap of the new site to Google but that's pretty much it
 
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rninja

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I've got a standard WordPress hosting account, not a reseller account.

Do you need to keep the old domain active for a period of time for redirects to work correctly?
 
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Jon

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Do you need to keep the old domain active for a period of time for redirects to work correctly?

yes the old domain would need to stay active with redirects if you want

blah.com/url1 > newwebsite.com/newurl1

blah.com/url2 > newwebsite.com/newurl2

HOWEVER

If you just want a blanket redirect so that if someone hits the website via google no matter what the page they are after and instead they now get redirected to the home page of the new site you can do that via Cpanel but I wouldn't recommend it
 

rninja

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Ahh, damn that's a shame and would be a pain to continue paying for essentially a redundant domain.

Maybe I should keep the existing domain in the existing niche,...and develop a different site exploring other more diverse content
 

Jon

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Ahh, damn that's a shame and would be a pain to continue paying for essentially a redundant domain.

Maybe I should keep the existing domain in the existing niche,...and develop a different site exploring other more diverse content
Well you wouldn't keep it indefinitely

You would remove the old sitemap from Google and then the re-directs would only exist to pick up any external links you have to your old domain that you want to go the new one and keep the link juice

or you could email the people who have your old site links and tell them to update it to the new one
 
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rninja

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Resurrecting an old thread again... If I want to redirect to a new domain, do I need to do individual redirects for each page from the old site?
 

Jon

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Resurrecting an old thread again... If I want to redirect to a new domain, do I need to do individual redirects for each page from the old site?
I think so yes

there may be A way to do it in your .htacccess file on your server, ask your hosting company
 
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rninja

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Cheers. I've decided to go for a domain name change.
Some of my pages have no link juice, is there an issue with duplicate content between websites if i simply copy and paste across?
 

Jon

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Cheers. I've decided to go for a domain name change.
Some of my pages have no link juice, is there an issue with duplicate content between websites if i simply copy and paste across?
No as long as you go into google search console and delete the old site map
 
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rninja

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Wow, this is gonna be one long project over xmas. It'll keep me out of trouble lol. But I'm hoping the long term strategy bears fruit :)
 

Jon

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Wow, this is gonna be one long project over xmas. It'll keep me out of trouble lol. But I'm hoping the long term strategy bears fruit :)
Honestly, have a word with your hosting company to find the simpliest way of doing it which won't damagin your content that does already rank well.

When I moved from SMF Forum software to XenForo EVERYTHING changes, the URLS, profiles, internal links, THE LOT! It was a huge nightmare which from a user point of view was absolutely fine but had me tearing my hair out but sometimes you have to just suck that up because you are doing 'short term pain for long term gain'!

The issue I had was that all the old links in google were now pointing to threads that no longer existed and I'm SURE I had a add some code into my .htaccess to make it so if people hit my site by clicking a link with the prefix https:///themoneyshed.co.uk/oldforum/thread they would get re-directed to /newforum/thread

it's all possible basically!

I totally understand why LARGE sites hate making wholesale changes. the green site forum should have been moved to new forum software years ago but lords know how you deal with a site THAT complex but sometimes I just needs doing to improve user experience or whatever.
 

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