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Suppose I have been using a domain, say www.bollywoodhatke.com for 3 years, and it has a good Alexa (hypothetical situation). It has backlinks and its has 7,000 pages indexed and 50,000 images indexed, but later there is a reason I am forced to change the domain name where the website is served.

In that case →

Would it be possible to tell Google that we are the same people with the same website, but the domain name changed?

I mean, can I somehow transfer the content to the new domain so that all the pages are indexed immediately, backlink juice is also transferred to the new domain, and all the pages indexed correctly?

I think moz.com was semoz.com previously. They must have certainly done something.

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Yes, you can move a website from one domain to different domain and maintain the ranking.

This is very common when business re-branding is done and website needs to move from one domain to a different domain.

All you need to do is, set a permanent 301-redirection from your old domain to the new domain. Set the permanent redirection at domain level so that every single page of your website automatically will get redirected to respective pages on the new domain.

Let's say you had:

example.com

example.com/page1

example.com/page2

Now let's assume you wanted to move to myexample.com. Then set the redirection at the domain level and each page will get redirected to its respective page on the new domain like:

example.com => myexample.com

example.com/page1 => myexample.com/page1

example.com/page2 => myexample.com/page2

Important: also, worth using Google change of address tool to ensure a smooth transition and minimizing the impact on current ranking. You can do this once the transfer will be complete.

You may also consider doing the following to make the transition smooth:

1) Must have 301-redirection from the old domain to the new domain.

2) Validate ownership of new domain in Google Search Console.

3) Submit XML-sitemap of the new domain.

Note: When you will do the transfer and above steps, for certain time (days, weeks) you may see your old website in the search result and slowly the ranking will move to the new domain and old website pages will start to disappear.

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  • So If I do it like this then, in that case, all my images and posts will be indexed by Google immediately based on the 301 redirect set and I will not lose any rankings etc? what about the backlinks? all the backlinks from my old domain will be transferred to the new domain?
    – The WP Novice
    Jun 3, 2017 at 6:06
  • I have explained the answer bit more in detail. Google will take days, weeks to crawl the new domain depending on the popularity. Yes, all the backlink weight will be passed across. Note: You need to leave the redirection for a significantly long time. You will not loose the ranking if SEO is done in the right way but you may see minor ranking change during the transition period.
    – TopQnA
    Jun 3, 2017 at 7:20
  • @TopQnA please mention change of address tool in your answer. It's do migration smoothly and It may give us some benefits like saving some Pagerank, otherwise there is no need to create a such tool, because Googlebot following redirection from decade.
    – Goyllo
    Jun 4, 2017 at 18:05
  • Good point Goyllo. Included in the answer.
    – TopQnA
    Jun 5, 2017 at 0:29
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As mentioned by @TopQnA, yes, it is possible but unfortunately, it isn't as easy as mentioned by the fellow forum user.

The process of 301 redirections has to be done with extreme care. You'll have to create 'One to One' redirects if you don't want to lose the SEO benefits. For example - There's a page called '2017 Bollywood movies'. Now while you are creating pages in the new website, there must be the same page on it to which the old '2017 Bollywood Movies' page will get redirected to.

Moreover, if it is not possible for you to create all similar pages on the new domain, then carefully redirect the same to next most relevant page.

The main concern here is, when you'll change your domain, all the indexed pages of your old domain shouldn't give 404s and also shouldn't get redirected to a different page as shown in the search results.

This way, your efforts and SEO benefits will remain intact.

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  • For example, there is a page say → www.bollywoodhatke.com/the-gorgeous-deepika/ and now when I completely transferred my WordPress website to the new domain the page will be like this → www.new-domain.com/the-gorgeous-deepika/ similar all my posts and media pages will change just in the domain name. In that will the transfer be somooth?
    – The WP Novice
    Jun 3, 2017 at 6:54
  • Absolutely! For more clarification read this - support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en and mark my answer as correct if you have got the answer :)
    – Zubair Abbas
    Jun 3, 2017 at 7:06
  • This answer doesn't address the question correctly. The question is to move the entire site to a new domain with the same content.
    – TopQnA
    Jun 3, 2017 at 7:24
  • Your edited answer is same as what I was trying to explain :)
    – Zubair Abbas
    Jun 3, 2017 at 12:55

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