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Domain migration strategy to new domain

fenley

4:12 pm on Nov 2, 2023 (gmt 0)

Hello,
I'm posting the first time on this forum thanks to ChatGPT who had recommended it to me.
I was new to SEO when I've chosen a domain name that is similar to a famous brand. This causes me to get 300-600 daily visits to my landing page with only 7 pages. The landing page was a free tool.
When I've started optimizing for SEO by writing articles, my traffic had tripled with 70% of that traffic going to the landing page which has the most resemblance with the original branding.
Now I'm facing a domain dispute and apparently I'll loose this domain. I have small delay (10 days maybe) where I have to act.
I've already bought a new domain name (a clean one I hope). My actual website state is a set of tools, each tool page has an article, and for each tool I've made 3 to 5 articles (50 urls). I am wondering:
* Should I start from scratch by enhancing all the articles, and tweaking them to make better content without being duplicated etc, now that I have the data of my old website, and by replacing the old "supposed" branding name by my new one?
* Should I redirect the whole website and signal that by submitting my old sitemap, or submit URLs one by one (10 days isn't much for a domain migration from my knowledge)

Any suggestion is welcomed!
Thank you!

not2easy

1:04 pm on Nov 3, 2023 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator

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Hi fenley and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

If your site was doing well I would not start by making changes. Google digests things slowly so changes should be minimal until the new domain is fully absorbed. Keep in mind that you can only redirect those old URLs to the new domain as long as you own the old domain. If you are able to keep the old domain and redirect the URLs, be sure to use 301 (permanent) as opposed to 302 (temporary) rewrites. Do not block robots, they need to learn the new location - but they should land on the new domain when it is live. It takes coordination between the old and new to do it properly.

You will need to have the new domain up and showing your content before you can submit any sitemap. If you have a GSC account for the old domain you should remove your old sitemap from that account as soon as the new domain is serving your content. Open a new account for the new domain and as soon as the new domain is ready for public consumption and have it verified so you can submit a new sitemap there. Don't drip the new URLs one at a time, do all your edits offline, when ready, upload the changes to both domains and submit a new sitemap only for the new domain.

If you had not submitted a sitemap for Bing, you might want to look into that since you won't be migrating in their case, if you did not previously have an account. I suggest it because people have noticed that bing is doing better than they expected recently. You can see some of that here: [webmasterworld.com...]

engine

3:39 pm on Nov 3, 2023 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Welcome fenley

Good info from not2easy

Just keep the original site content for the time being, especially when you have redirects.

I'd add, if you have incoming links, you might want to trawl those of value and have them redirected to the new site as soon as possible.

Start pointing new links to the new site right away.

You don't have a lot of time and 10-days is not enough time for it to be without problems, but the redirects will greatly help.