Does A URL Change Lead To A Rank Drop and Traffic Loss?

Your website URL is your piece of real estate in the virtual world, so changing your domain is a major undertaking. It’s like moving from one house to another, and there will likely be a rank and traffic drop following the switch. If you’ve done everything correctly, the drop should only be temporary and come back to normal within a few months.

Why is it Such a Big Deal?

You may think that changing domains shouldn’t be a big deal because the site looks exactly the same, but that’s not the case in the eyes of Google. Google sees the new domain as a brand new website and it’s not going to be indexed yet. It’s like if you moved to another town and can’t figure out why all your friends haven’t stopped by… oh yeah, you forgot to tell them you moved. Don’t take a URL change lightly and only do it if absolutely necessary such as moving from a .net or .biz to a .com, name of business change, or a more user-friendly website name.

301 Redirects Save Your Link Juice

When you switch to a new domain, it’s not going to be indexed yet. Your old site will be, but those pages will be gone. The only way to save your SEO juice is to set up 301 redirects from the old website to the new one. A 301 redirect is preferred by Google and permanently sets that anyone going to the old URLs will be sent to the new URLs. As time goes on, the old pages will be deindexed and your new pages will take over. Without 301 redirects, customers will see a 404 error when the visit the old site. This can lead to a dramatic loss in traffic unless they’re redirected to your new URL.

Tell Google You Moved

Over time, Google will naturally index your site bit by bit, but don’t take chances. Google Search console allows you to notify them that you’ve moved. Create and verify your new site URL and check to see if there have been any problems with penalties, etc. and have those fixed prior to moving. If you’re worried about dropped traffic because of the domain change, consider creating a PPC campaign to make up for the loss.

A sitemap is a list of every URL on your site and Google can use it as a roadmap for indexing. You have to create the sitemap and then upload it to search console. If you go to “crawl” and “fetch as Google,” you can request that Google index your site for both mobile and desktop.

Check Links On Your Site

Once you’ve moved, it’s important that you go through and look at your internal linking and make sure they’re not going to the old site. An audit on your site should show any broken links once the old site is down. If you have prominent inbound links, then you should contact them and provide them with the new URL.

Sites can get significant referral traffic from inbound links, so make sure they’re all up to date. With the 301 redirects in place, people would still get to your site from the old inbound link, but you’ll want to maintain your domain authority.

If you follow these steps, then your domain change shouldn’t be a horribly painful process. There will likely be a drop, but it should subside after a few months.