Member Avatar for harshadgowda

Hi!

Recently I have decided to change my website from Fred's Fashion Boutique to Fred's Fashion (because the URL became available) and I was in the process of a redesign so I thought it would be a good time.

My website is only about 3 months old so wasn't receiving a lot of organic traffic (around 20 a month) but it was on the rise. I was wondering what I need to do in order for my organic traffic to not halt completely.

Also, I had a few backlinks to my website and was wondering if I created a permanent redirect whether the backlinks would be redirected to my new URL which would give it some authority?

I'm still fairly new at SEO and all that so any general tips that you think would help me my SEO for my website would be much appreciated! Also, I am wondering what is the best way to build backlinks and general tips in getting a good domain authority.

Edited by Dani because: Moved to correct forum
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Good plan to rebrand — you already asked the right questions. As pointed out, redirects are the baseline. Here are the next, high-impact steps you should do (and watch) to protect SEO during the move.

  • Verify both old and new domains in Google Search Console and use the site-move guidance.
  • Publish and submit a sitemap for the new domain, then request indexing for priority pages.
  • Update internal links, canonical tags, and any hard-coded URLs so they point to the new domain (this reduces needless redirects).
  • Update analytics (annotate the migration date) and keep both properties available so you can compare traffic.
  • Contact the owners of your highest-value backlinks and ask them to update links to the new domain.
  • Update business listings, social profiles, and any platforms that list your URL.
  • Keep the old domain live with redirects for many months; monitor for redirect chains and fix them.
  • Watch Search Console (coverage, index status, links) and server logs closely for crawler errors or spikes in 4xx/5xx responses.

Avoid making major content or structural changes at the same time as the move — make the migration the primary variable. Expect some short-term ranking fluctuation; with careful monitoring and the items above you should recover quickly. See Google’s site-move guidance for the official checklist: .

Member Avatar for Dani

Hi there and good question!

If you want to redirect your website to a different domain name, you need to use an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect from every old page to its new counterpart. For example, old-domain.com/page1.html should redirect to new-domain.com/page1.html and old-domain.com/page2.html shoudl redirect to new-domain.com/page2.html

Do a 1-to-1 mapping for every file, folder, asset (CSS, JS, etc.) from the old domain to the new domain. This will tell Google that the file has permanently moved to a new location, and from now on to find the content at the new URL. As they crawl your site, they will naturally remove the old URLs from the index and instead start indexing the new URLs.

Do not set any URLs up on the old domain as 404 pages (unless they do not exist at the new domain).

Doing it this way, you should not lose any traffic. It is possible that you may lose a tiny fraction of page authority, but it should be nimimal. The page authority will carry over to the equivalent pages on the new domain.

It's very important that you do a 1-to-1 mapping. Pages should only be 301 redirected to other pages with identical, or near-identical, content. Do not 301 redirect pages from the old domain to the homepage of the new domain, thinking that you want to condense authority. That will only hurt you.

Good luck.

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