Moving websites and impact on SEO

  • Unknown's avatar
    superdavies · Member ·

    Hi,

    I am working on creating a new website for my friends business. They currently have a WordPress website which is very outdated and not optimised for mobile, so they want a new website with a new domain (business name changed last year).I have built him a nice new website and purchased a new domain which is ready to go live but I am concerned about how google will react to this new website and I just want to know best practice for something like this.

    I am just wondering is there a way of ‘transfering’ the SERP ranking from the old website to the new one, maybe by linking/merging the two websites to show they are the same business? Also do you recommend keeping the old website live and just re-directing traffic to the new website? My only concern with doing this is that a lot of the content on the old website will match the content on the new website and I am not sure will that negatively impact the new sites Google ranking performance in the future.

    Hope my query doesn’t sound too stupid, I am still learning :) Any tips or advise would be much appreciated.

    Chris.

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Hi Chris,

    I’m afraid there is really no way to transfer the ranking on search engines, however, you may set up a redirect from the old domain to the new one. That way, even if someone clicks the link to the old site, they will end up on the new one.
    If the old site is also on WordPress.com, you can purchase the Site Redirect subscription:

    https://wordpress.com/support/site-redirect/

    Also, remember that with your plan you can access Live Chat directly via https://wordpress.com/help/contact. That way you can get help faster.

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