SEO Best Practices for Moving Domains

When is it time to 301-redirect to the a new domain?  When is it time to use rel=canonical or submit new sitemaps during a domain move?  Switching domains can be a terrifying process–for good reason.  One misstep and the search engines might follow our bad instructions. Author and SEO expert Dan Thies visited with OMCP to lay out the best practices, and the proper order of them, when switching to a new domain.

The OMCP Online Marketing Best Practices Podcast is where top authors and industry leaders share authoritative best practices in online marketing which are covered by the OMCP standard, competencies, and exams.  This is an OMCP pilot program that may continue based on member interest and support. Stay subscribed to the OMCP newsletter to get new episodes.

Download your MP3 of “Changing Domains Best Practices for SEO with Dan Thies” here.

SEO Best Practices for Switching Web Domains:

This episode is brought to you by:

 Concordia College–New York’s fully online, advanced-technology master’s degree programs in Digital Marketing and Digital Media.

Michael: All right, welcome back to the OMCP studio. And with us today, we have Dan Thies. Dan has been helping his clients and friends promote their businesses online since Netscape was a startup. He’s been doing SEO since before we called it SEO. Dan plays the wind chimes in his spare time and is the author of “Search Engine Optimization Fast Start,” one of the most popular SEO books of all times. I’m your host, Michael Stebbins, and today, we’ll be discussing best practices for changing domains. Dan, welcome to the OMCP Best Practices podcast. I’m really amped you’re with us today.

Dan: Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me. I was excited to do this and I think what you’re doing here is really important. It’s important for us to capture best practices as best we can and get them someplace. So I’m glad I can have a chance to chip in here.

Michael: Really excited about teaching and learning about changing domains. But before we get started, for those who haven’t read your books or attended your classes or heard you speak, tell our audience who are you and what is it that you do.

Dan: Well, you know, Barry Schwartz called me the godfather of grunge of SEO. So I guess that’s good. I’m doing now what I’ve kind of always done. You know, I work with people, clients, friends, and students. Some people pay me, some people don’t. I run a lot of tests, but I also have a lot of friends in the industry. So my favorite thing to do is to get in behind the scenes and look at what other people are doing and, you know, maybe help them improve it. But at the very least, I can learn something from what they’re doing.

Right now, I’m just finishing up an update of the fourth edition of my Link Liberation training, which is about getting links without begging, borrowing, buying. And we’re finally, finally getting ready to actually do a public launch for our ResultFlow software. We use that to automate our content marketing processes. And it has not had a website,