March 8, 2012

Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration - The Infographic

Technical SEO

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Domain migrations are one of those activities that even if in the long-term can represent a benefit for an SEO process -- especially if the new domain is more relevant, has already a high authority or give better geolocalization signals with a ccTLD -- can represent a risk for SEO because of the multiple tasks that should be performed correctly in order to avoid potential non-trivial crawling and indexing problems and consequential lost of rankings and organic traffic.

I did a quick research for a recent domain migration that I needed to supervise and realized that even if there are a few resources there isn't a complete list covering all of the different aspects that should be taken into consideration in order to implement and validate a domain migration from an SEO perspective.

The checklist - infographic for an SEO friendly domain migration process

With so few information I did a checklist compiling the different activities I needed perform during the different phases of the migration process -decision making, planning, implementation and monitoring- that was a great help to keep me on track and I would like to share through the following "infographic / checklist" where I have also added some of the tools that I used:

You can click on the image above to see a bigger version of the image or download it directly from here.

Please note that this is a checklist for a domain migration process -not a redesign, URL structure change or CMS migration, that would add more complexity and additional validation to the specified phases-.

Some of the articles that were of help to build this checklist -and would be also great if you can take a look at- are:

I hope all this helps you as much it has helped me! What other aspects do you take into consideration to make sure SEO don't suffer from domain migrations?