Disclosure: Optimate Group Pty Ltd has a financial interest in The Jujube Tree Nursery.
Background:
The Jujube Tree Nursery is an online nursery specialising in the jujube tree. The history is here. This particular site was built to replace a previous site under a different domain. The previous site has been around since 2011, was well-known to search engines, and had been ranking well for particular searches, but a new domain was needed to reflect the change in business direction.
The Problem to Solve:
We didn’t want the old site to remain live, and had completely new content for the new site. But if we terminated the old site we would lose years of search engine indexing, and it would be as if that site had never existed. Similarly, creating a new site for the new domain would require time for it and its new content to become known to search engines. We needed the reputation of the old site to be transferred to the new site, and quickly.
The Solution:
We run our own web hosting company, and with our hosting knowledge set up what are known as 301 redirections from addresses on the old domain to ones on the new domain. In simpler terms, these are instructions that tell search engines the first domain is no longer active, and to follow the redirections to the new domain to begin indexing that.
In Conclusion:
The new site was found — and indexed — very quickly. The new site was live late November 2018, and took its first order within a week. The nest step was to add a blog, and the case study of that is the subject of the next post.
Would you like help moving an existing site, and making the move as seamless and streamlined as possible? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if so!