During a website migration, it’s extremely important to involve Bill Hartzer during this process. There are several steps involved in a successful site migration, which is when one website is moved from one domain name to another. Steps include determining which content and pages are going to be moved, and which are not going to be migrated to the new website or domain name. Redirect, links, and content are involved. If it’s not done right, it can be a real mess—which can include a dramatic loss of search engine traffic, website errors, and a lot of leads and sales.
SEO Deliverables
There are several deliverables during the site migration process, and which ones provided depend on the actual project. Bill Hartzer should review the plan for the migration, or Bill Hartzer can come up with a plan. Bill Hartzer can provide recommendations during the process, and provide lists of redirects, lists of links, and even a content strategy for the new website.
Once a domain migration is complete, the SEO monthly SEO services should begin, building on the wins and goals of the website migration. Certainly there are ongoing tasks, such as working on the links pointing to the website, that most likely need to be updated.
What a Domain Migration Actually Involves
A domain migration (moving a website from one domain name to another) is the highest-risk change a website can make, because every signal Google has accumulated about the site is tied to URLs that are about to stop existing. I have managed hundreds of migrations over more than twenty years, for rebrands, mergers and acquisitions, consolidations of several sites into one, and upgrades to a better domain. The ones that succeed share a common structure: a complete inventory of the old site, a page-by-page redirect map, a technical audit of the new site before launch, a coordinated DNS and redirect cutover, and monitoring that continues for months afterward.
Inventory comes first. I crawl the existing site with Screaming Frog, export every indexed URL from Google Search Console, pull the backlink targets from Majestic and Semrush, and list the pages that earn organic traffic in Google Analytics. The union of those lists is what has to be redirected. Pages that appear in none of them are candidates for retirement, but a page that has links or rankings is kept or redirected to its closest equivalent, never dropped.
The Redirect Map and the Cutover
The redirect map is a spreadsheet with one row per old URL and its destination on the new domain. Each redirect is a single 301, not a chain through an intermediate URL and not a blanket rule that sends everything to the home page. Where the new site also changes URL structure, the map handles both changes in one hop. The map is tested on the staging environment before cutover and again within an hour of going live.
On cutover day the sequence matters: the new site is verified in Search Console, the redirects are deployed, the DNS change is made, the new XML sitemap is submitted, and the Change of Address tool is used in Search Console to tell Google explicitly that the site has moved. Internal links are updated to point directly at the new domain rather than relying on the redirects, and the most valuable external links are requested to be updated by the sites that host them.
What to Expect After the Move
Google processes a domain change over weeks, not days. A temporary dip in rankings during the first two to four weeks is normal; a continuing decline after that is not, and it points to a specific failure that the crawl and Search Console data will identify, most often missed redirects, redirect chains, a canonical tag still pointing at the old domain, or the old domain’s hosting being cancelled so that the redirects stopped working. The old domain must be kept registered and its redirects kept live indefinitely, because the links pointing at it do not go away.
Migration Recovery
A significant part of my migration work is recovery: being retained after a move that was handled without SEO (search engine optimization) involvement and cost the business most of its organic traffic. Recovery is possible in most cases, but it takes longer than doing the migration correctly would have, and some losses, such as links on sites that have since removed them, cannot be reversed. If a migration is in the planning stage, the time to involve me is before the redirect map is written, not after the traffic has dropped.
Ongoing Monthly SEO Services and SEO Consulting
While Hartzer Consulting specializes in technical SEO audits of websites, we also provide SEO consulting services, on a retainer basis. We always prefer to begin all new projects with a technical SEO audit to find out the issues that need to be addressed. Contact us today to find out more about our monthly SEO services and how we can help you reach the goals for your website.
When a redesign or domain change is followed by a traffic collapse, the questions of redirect mapping, indexation and standard of care are addressed on the website migration SEO failure expert witness page.
A new site should be crawlable, indexable and measured from the day it goes live; that work is described under website launch SEO services.
A redesign is the most common way a site loses rankings it took years to earn; the website redesign SEO services page explains how to carry the equity across.
A small technical choice that causes real migration problems is covered in absolute versus relative linking in websites.
The step-by-step version of this work is the checklist for moving or migrating to a new domain.