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Most companies need a new domain for the company site when certain changes are introduced within the company itself, for example, rebranding is carried out. In this case the new domain name of the company website should reflect the changes that have been made. At the same time it should prevent the site from losing its search engine rankings and traffic. How to change domain properly?
Let us imagine that a company is going to enter a new market, or a company has merged with other companies or acquired other companies, or any other changes in the company structure have been introduced. In all these cases it is not reasonable anymore to go on using the old domain name of the company website: the old domain name was designed to solve certain tasks, but the company has changed therefore the tasks have also changed. It is necessary to change the domain of the company website.
A new domain name for the company website is purchased on general grounds: you choose the desired domain name in one of domain zones, then you check its availability (whether it is occupied or not). If the desired domain name is free, you pay for it according to the domain name registrar tariffs.
Then your should access the domain control panel and replace default DNS records for the domain by the DNS records specified by your hosting provider. Domain delegation may take some time; wait a bit, and in a couple of hours your new domain name will be attached to your site, and the site will be available by its new domain name.
However, in this case neither visitors of your site nor search engines know that the site has “moved”. Therefore you should use domain redirection (domain forwarding)to let your visitors end up at the correct website.
There are several kinds of redirects. How are they determined? The World Wide Web uses the HTTP protocol. In this protocol a redirect refers to a response that makes the browser go to another site. Each response has its 3-number status code that begins with 3. This code describes the reason of redirect. For example, when a site has changed its domain, most webmasters use the so-called “moved permanently” redirect, or 301 redirect.
301 redirect allows to preserve the site rankings (for instance, Google PageRank and Yandex citation index) and the link weight of the old domain. Therefore the site will lose nothing from the point of view of search engine optimization, or its losses will be minimal.
How to produce 301 status code when you change domain?
If you use the Apache HTTP server, you can produce 301 status code using the .htaccess file or one of the main Apache config files, for example, httpd.conf (the second variant is even more preferable as .htaccess may be disabled by the host). The most widespread variant of 301 redirect is the following:
Redirect 301 / http://www.sitename.com/new.htm
In this case Redirect 301 is a command which shows that visitors of the site have to be forwarded to the new domain. The “/” sign means, that all content of the top level of the site must be redirected. http://www.sitename.com/new.htm is the URL of the new page or site. If the redirect leads to the site, you must put “/” in the end.
Besides, you can also use the following syntax for redirection of your site:
RedirectPermanent / http://www.you.com/
You can make page by page redirect to the new domain of your site. For this purpose you should add the following construction to the .htaccess or httpd.conf file:
Redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.sitename.com/new.htm,
where: /old/old.htm – the name and the path of the old page
And search engines recommend that you should use the following construction when you changed the domain and want to produce the 301 status code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://newdomain.ru/$1 [R=301,L]
However, when your company website undergoes changes that result from the changes in the company structure, in most cases it is not enough just to change the domain. Sometimes you also have to change the structure of the site, its design – i.e. carry out the redesign of the site.
Redesign of the site is a set of works that is aimed at reaching maximum efficiency of the outdated site or changing the site because of changes that were introduced within the company. Web design studio WebStudio2U offers redesign and modernization of websites. In our studio you can always receive the full range of services in the sphere of web design and web development. We guarantee that the result of our collaboration will meet all your requirements!
Would you like to have a modern, easy-to-use, functional and above all effective website? Then do not hesitate and submit a request for website redesign in web design studio WebStudio2U right now!
TAGS
new domain,
change domain,
how to change domain,
website redesign,
301 redirect,
moved permanently redirect |
redesign 
