Changing domain while keeping backlinks and authority ?
Hi, A client has a domain name that doesn't look very professional like example.paris The head manager seems to want to change it to a .com
But it has a lot of backlinks redirecting to it and ranks pretty high in google. It has a lot of organic trafic and sales thanks to that. Would it be a bad idea to change the domain name and therefore loose all this visibility and website traffic?
Is there a way to change the domain name while keeping the authority of the website and backlinks ?
Thanks in advance guys, I am really unsure about what to tell them and what the right move is...
Rewrite URL using .htaccess file. For more information,
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1945568/htaccess-redirect-all-pages-to-new-domainChanging domain name is inevitable sometimes and Google understands it. What you want to do is 301 (or 308) redirect all the pages to their new URLs.
so basically:
example.paris -> example.com
example.paris/article-1 -> example.com/article-1
etc.
Once you're done with that, you should be able to capture all the direct traffic immediately and while you will see some changes in SERP, Google should figure it out. Can't tell how quick - it also depends on the site itself.
Keep the same domain owner. Create a site map and make it available to search engines. Create 301 redirections to new pages. Update backlinks. Inform Google of the domain name change.
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