Often times this is the case with many businesses. They are not satisfied with their original name, and they want to move. Some people think that moving to a new domain can cause in huge ranking loss while others think it kills traffic. Well I will ask one question, when you move to a new house do you lose everything? Does your relatives stop coming to your house?

Obviously not because you make sure everything gets in the truck that you rented to move. You pack everything. Before you move, you check the other house that everything is fine, and your life will be great there. You give your relatives your new address and directions, so they can still visit you. Well moving to a new domain works along the same line. I am not saying that it is easy because you all know that moving is a pain in real life, and even online. But I can help you maintain the same search engine rankings and traffic if you ever decide to move to a new domain.

Acquire your new location

You can’t move into a house without signing a contract, or lease of a kind. You must make sure that you buy the house before you move in. Just like that you must make sure that you register the new domain before hands. Why do I say that. Well because I know most people are very indecisive when picking new domains. So think of it like moving your real business. Do you stay indecisive when you are moving to your new house. Which house you want to move until the last day? I am pretty sure people don’t do that. They make plans ahead of time. They buy one house that they want, and then plan the moving date. So register the domain of your choice and take the next step.

Decide Moving Date and Prepare to move

Ok so the next step is decide a moving date. You can’t just have a house, and have no plan. Moving is such a painful and complicated process that if you don’t plan it. You will mess up. So plan a date when you want to move, so you are ready. When I say you are ready, I mean a date when you have nothing else to do but this, so moving can be quick and efficient.

Before you move in the new house, you have to go and make sure everything looks fine. You paint the walls maybe add some light bulbs etc. Just like that when you move to a new domain online, you need to make sure all the online requirements such as hosting are taken care of. You have a new design ready and everything.

Pack up and Move already

Packing up is a pain in real life. You have to organize everything. Kitchen utencils on one place, while decorations on another. Well websites are a bit easier then that. You have everything organized already. And the best thing about websites are that you don’t have to leave your old place to have a new place occupied. You can just copy and everything and paste it to the new location.

So make sure you have your web design and everything ready. Make a copy of it and move to a new location. So I am saying don’t leave your old location yet.

If you are going to use a same design, at least change the logo although I prefer you get a new design. Make sure you change all the urls to point to the new domain instead of the old domain. Make sure you keep all the pages and paths similar to your old website because otherwise it will be a lot of work for you.

Redirect your traffic

Once you have fully moved and you are ready to announce it. Well then announce it already. Let all your relatives know and everyone that you moved into a new house, so they can visit you. In old days people used to have a landing page saying We’ve moved, please visit us here. Which is pretty lame in my opinion, so lets just use the redirect method where your user will automatically land on your new page if they type your old domain.

If you followed my direction and kept the same path and file names then you can use the 301 redirect method:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

But if you decide to move and change your locations around, you are making your life a living hell because depend on how many page you have, you would have to individually redirect them.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.site.com/page.htm

If you were wondering where you put these codes, you put them in .htaccess file in your public_html directory.

Keeping your Search Engine Rankings (SERPs)

We are at a tough road here. A danger zone because most people think they lose their rankings. Because people don’t know about their new locations, so they lose business. But these effects are short term because I am sure you are advertising yourself that you have moved. Meaning now you are advertising your new url.

Search Engines are bit dumber then real people, so they need extra notification. That is why we are using 301 redirects above. Basically what that does for you is transfer all the link juice / link value from your old domain to a new domain. It can take anywhere from weeks to months for the link juice to be entirely transferred so be patient because it will transfer.

Keep your Old Location

As I mentioned above that being online makes it easy for us to keep our files on two separate locations. But I am not even saying that keep your files on other site as well. Just keep the domain, so the 301 redirect keep working. Google actually recommends you to keep the old domain for about 180 days, so you avoid confusion. I think keeping it forever is not very expensive. You are just paying $7 extra for registration fee. I think it is well worth it because you don’t know what people type. Also don’t forget that you have backlinks from so many other sites that haven’t changed the url to a new url. So you will lose all that traffic. So it is best to keep the old domain.

Bang Bang Advertisement – Get the words out

Let people know that you have moved. People used to know you with a different name, so you need to brand your new name even more, so when people remember you they remember your new name not your old one. So get on with advertising. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer to see your backlinks and then ask them to change it to your new site. Most will, but some won’t but this is a step toward making the link juice transfer part faster.

Monday is here and we are staring a new week and a new month. I am happy and looking forward to what comes next. The past week was hectic. If you didn’t read what happened, here is a small summary. My old host went down for 2 days. I switched to Hostgator. The day after I switched they came back. But I am with host gator. I had to upload 10GB of files to hostgator now.

I was crazy sick and that delayed a lot of posts that I wanted to write which you will see this week. I am still not completely over the sickness, but I am feeling much better now.

Check out some of the cool reads that I had.

Google Debunk Webmaster Myth – Some excellent questions and answers about Google.

Technorati Authority is Manipulated to Easily – Most ranking systems online have break through, and this is another one.

Five Ways to Cash in Big Before New Year – Zac has always come up with new ideas. There are some more ideas for you if you want to make money before New Year.

Hunting Down Buyers for Website Flippers – Everyone talks about site flipping. This interesting article shows you how to actually hunt buyers.

Election day 2008 and your resources – You all know election is coming pretty soon. This is the article that shares some of the best resources. Don’t forget to go out and vote.

That is the end of the Sweet Monday. Hopefully we will get the pimp my blog done soon. I can say that web designing industry is not going down due to economy because my local clients are just increasing.

Its time for another tip sunday. Last week it was Shutter Stock that gave me a shirt. This week it is another stock image company called Erickson Stock.

Personally I am going to say, I have never used Erickson Stock before, but what I did notice was that the pictures on their site were very nice. The best part that they told me was that the pictures are taken by one experienced photographer. And you can see that if you see the pictures, you will see the consistency in them. It is a great set of pictures, to use only on one website because the consistency it brings into the site.

Well you are wondering what they sent me. They gave me a cool Hat.

I am sure you like the cap. Definitely go check out Erickson Stock. If you want to appear on Tip Sunday. Send me a shirt or any gift that have your business logo on it.

Everyone needs some fun in their life. Well Halloween was the perfect time for it. My Friends and I decided to have a little get together. It was like a mini-version of the party. Everyone who was invited was suppose to bring a dessert. I made Fruit Cocktail (NO Alcohol). It had Whip Cream that was mixed with condensed milk, and pineapple/peaches/grapes.

I just turned 18, but it still didn’t stop me from going and collecting Candies from everywhere lol. I actually only went to one of the local Stores (Publix) because they were giving out candies.

I decided to be a Desert Prince.

You might think it is a traditional outfit, but it is not because it is really a costume that I got from Party City. Our party was fun. Everyone dressed up. We had a Scientist, we had a Pirate couple, sailor, devil, tropical girl and I can’t remember all now.

But we played a lot of games. Such as designing a pumpkin. I didn’t win because I wasn’t in all the mood to do any artwork. I gave it a shot by just randomly coloring the pumpkin. Obviously won’t post it here because I didn’t think it was all that great.

Then we played Limbo. I didn’t play that either. You might be thinking what is going on. I might be feeling a bit better, but I am not over the sickness yet. So it has everything off the hook. But I was the judge for the limbo. Beside I always lose in Limbo anyways. I am too tall for this thing.

Then we played made things with Play Doh. I came second out of 6 people. That is because I destroyed my last round entry before the final judge who wasn’t the judge before just decided to watch everyone’s. I think it was biased juding. That was fun as well.

I got good sportsman ship award. Yeah we handed out award to everyone. At least this year, I didn’t win the biggest cheater award. Or maybe I have just gotten so good, that Nobody caught me

Well it was a fun night out. I think people should enjoy life whenever they can and hang out with friends. I hope you all had fun at Halloween at least those who celebrated it.