Moving to New Domain - Ranking impact

[steermoz8]

I understand that when migrating to a new site, even if done perfectly (page level 301s etc) that rankings will drop in the short term and each site will be impacted differently.  I picked up the following comment and was wanting to get a few experts thoughts on whether I can quote this to my client:

"In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "

[JaneCopland]

Hi Conrad,

Unfortunately every migration is going to yield different results in terms of how well the redirection goes and how long you have to wait to get your rankings back if they suffer. Thomas' experience is fairly typical (and the resources he cites here are good too). It's impossible to say what will happen - a particularly large site (let's say a big e-commerce site for a high-street retailer) might suffer due to the sheer volume of URLs that need to be moved and picked up by Google; a small website may have an easier time. However, metrics like the age and authority of the moving website may well play into how successful the move is as well. As such, it's really hard to say exactly how a migration will go without seeing the sites (and even then, ranking problems can crop up that were unexpected).

Cheers,

Jane

[BlueprintMarketing]

If the hosting company changed servers or you changed hosting companies it should not matter in terms of domain switching unless you forgot to update something like the database file for all the URLs if you are using Word press or another CMS that has a MySQL database.

Obviously moving to a new domain has a lot of complications and switching the hosting can just really add to it. However, sometimes it must be done.

I have swapped hosting companies and not seeing a drop in any way shape or form many times. In fact I cannot recall a time that I have ever seen a drop from swapping just hosting.

I am not saying it is impossible but when done right it should not make a difference.

Having said that if you are a hosting company that gives you a staging server that you are supposed to incorporate into your DNS to get rid of the possibility of duplicate content that could be a huge issue. All staging server should be no follow no index robots-X

if it is a company that had an alias or staging server be certain that URL is not in a database somewhere.

however if you find you have a database and you have not updated it to reflect the new domain I would recommend a tool like this

https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

Any CMS to CMS

http://www.cms2cms.com/supported-cms/wordpress/

For WordPress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-move-wordpress-to-a-new-domain-without-losing-seo/

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think this post from a few months back will help shed some light on the situation. In my experience from moving a company using a .de to .com it was a drop time of only 3 1/2 weeks to a month however we constantly told Google that we were changing domains remember to do that.

I hope this helps as well

http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch

http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

sincerely,

Thomas

[Travis_Bailey]

That almost sounds like the result of a host changing servers on you. I hate it when that happens. That would be the absolute smoothest transition. I would account for a little error.

But as the man said, that's with painstaking attention to detail - all things being equal - and some off-site concerns. I would be careful about how you link clients. It seldom hurts to have a new domain with greater age and a good history. A new or younger domain will likely be a little more difficult.