Case Study: Migrating from One Domain to Another
A client of mine wanted to migrate their blog from one domain fraudlent-clicks.com to ClickQualityConsultant.com. They had received some negative feedback on the use of fraudulent in their domain name, and this legitimate click fraud blog wanted a better image. They were fighting the click fraud problem not promoting it.
What Are the Issues?
The fraudulent-clicks domain was already well established had a page rank and a sizeable number of pages included in the search engine index. This organic traffic was to be retained and forwarded to the new doimain.
The Solution
The second blog was built, and I used the migration tool to take all of the old posts into the new blog. I gave particular attention to the permalink structure in the new blog to ensure it was the same as the previous one.
Next I installed a redirection plugin to the old blog. This allowed me to take pages form the old blog and using the 301 redirection method permanently redirect these pages to a new URL on the correct domain.
Using 301 redirects tells the search engine that a page has been moved permanently and to update their index during the next crawl of your page, in the mean time any traffic landing at your old site will be redirected to the new site.
Follow Up
A month later I gained access to my clients Google webmaster tools to check how the old domain was fairing. There were a couple of 404 issues, but these were quickly amended. My client reported no real drop in organic traffic after this job.
