7 Steps to Keep Your Rankings

Does Changing Domain Names Affect Your SEO?

Changing domain names can affect your SEO in many ways. It can affect the authority, rankings, and traffic of your website.

If you don’t implement the correct practices, it can lead to essentially having to “start over” from an SEO perspective. One of the main reasons is that the backlinks pointing to your old website won’t automatically point to your new site.

The number and quality of the links pointing to your pages are important factors search engines like Google take into account when ranking your content.

Changing your domain name changes the URL of every page on your website. This means all the backlinks you had pointing to your old domain no longer point to your website.

This can affect how Google ranks your website in search results.

But there are other implications too. You could lose brand awareness if people are confused about your new domain or a change to your business name.

You could also create duplicate content issues. These can lead to problems with Google indexing and ranking your pages.

In short: It’s extremely important that you follow best practices any time you change your domain name.

This guide shares the steps you should take to minimize the effect of your domain name change on your SEO.

Step 1: Choose a New Domain Name

Your site’s domain name is not a direct ranking factor itself. But it can still impact your site’s traffic and conversions.

For example, if many people find your website by searching...