How Long For Indexation After Migrating to a New Domain

If you’re a regular reader here, you may have noticed that a few months ago the domain has changed from SEOHats.com to alexjuel.com.

I did this because I felt like SEOHats just didn’t make any sense. It was one of those spur of the moment purchases, I quickly put an SEO blog up and wrote a few posts over the years.

Towards the end of July 2009 I started to think that it would make more sense, and be more professional, to use my own name as my site. I already owned my name domain and wasn’t doing anything with it, so that’s what I decided to do.

If a client ever asks me do something like this I almost always recommend that they don’t or they can lose valuable links, authority, domain age, etc., but because I don’t use this site to bring in business (I work for seOverflow) I didn’t feel it was the wrong decision.

On Saturday August 1st, 2009 I completely moved WordPress to another domain, which was a bit of a pain, but not too, too bad. I’ve done it once before, so the move wasn’t as horrifying this time around.

After getting the domain all up and in order, I decided to take action in getting my new domain indexed in hopes that I wouldn’t lose too much traffic. I don’t use any rank tracking software for this domain, so I’m sorry that I can’t tell you how my rankings faired, but traffic is really the important measurement anyway.

The first thing I did was go into my Google Webmaster Tools account and added my new site, verified it and added the sitemap.xml file. Then I went into my old site in Google Webmaster Tools and used the “change of address” feature to tell Google that I’ve completely changed the URL.

The next day, I began the process of trying to get the site indexed quickly. Keep in mind that the tactics I’ve listed are NOT for building backlinks, but instead to get the search engines to find and spider the site quickly.

The first thing that I did was create a Google Base account and submitted a listing with my URL in it, mentioning that I was offering an SEO product.

Over the next two days, I went through a great list of quick indexing tips put together by local SEO guru, Andrew Shotland. There are 18 things on this list, so you’ll have plenty of work to do. I wasn’t able to complete all them, but I did most.

Last of all, I submitted my site to more “site profile” types of sites. Once you do a search on these sites, the profile is turned into a page on the site, which the search engines often pick up. In the list below, just paste your own domain in place of mine.

http://www.siteadvisor.cn/sites/alexjuel.com/summary/
http://whois.domaintools.com/alexjuel.com
http://www.aboutdomain.org/backlinks/alexjuel.com/
http://www.whoisya.com/alexjuel.com
http://www.who.is/whois-com/alexjuel.com
http://www.robtex.com/dns/alexjuel.com
http://www.zimbio.com/search?q=alexjuel.com&btnG=Search
http://whois.ws/whois-info/ip-address/alexjuel.com/
http://whoisx.co.uk/alexjuel.com
http://www.cubestat.com/alexjuel.com
http://whois.tools4noobs.com/info/alexjuel.com
http://www.builtwith.com/?alexjuel.com

And that’s everything I did within the first couple of days.

Here are the stats:

On the very first day, before migration, this is what the major search engines had indexed from SEOHats.com.

Google: 64 pages
Yahoo: 96 pages
Bing: 136 pages

I don’t have 136 pages on the site, but for some reason, BIng had my css, trackbacks, login page, category pages, etc.

Two days later on the following Monday, I saw one post had been indexed on Google, Bing had only my sitemap.xml file and Yahoo had nothing.

I wrote a post at about 10 a.m. that morning to add some fresh content.

On Wednesday, August 5th Google had a total of 5 pages indexed, Yahoo had one page indexed and Bing had two pages indexed, the XML sitemap and the home page.

I checked the search engines throughout the month:

Thursday, August 6th
Google: 9 Pages
Bing: 3 Pages
Yahoo: 6 pages

Friday, August 7
Google: 16 pages
Bing: 3
Yahoo: 5

Sunday, August 9th
Google: 35 pages
Yahoo: 11 pages
Bing: 3 pages

Monday, August 10th
Google: 38 pages
Yahoo: 12
Bing: 4

I added my XML sitemap to Yahoo SiteExplorer and Bing Webmaster Tools on the 10th to see if it would help.

Tuesday, August 11
Google: 43 pages
Yahoo: 15
Bing: 4 pages

Wednesday, August 12
Google: 43 pages
Bing: 4 pages
Yahoo: 15 pages

Friday, August 14
Google: 44 pages
Yahoo: 17 Pages
Bing: 4 pages

Tuesday, August 18th
Google: 44 pages
Yahoo: 15 pages
Bing: 4 pages

After August 18th I stopped checking all together. It was going slowly in Bing and Yahoo, but Google had most of my site indexed.

As of today, it seems that most or all of my site is indexed in both Google and Yahoo, but only 7 pages in Bing. Hmmm… There are still 42 pages from SEOHats.com indexed in Yahoo, two in Google and none in Bing.

It doesn’t look like it affected my traffic much at all. Just going off of a basic statistic, I had 157 visits in July before the migration and in August I had 193 visits.

There are two things I know I could have done better to make this process move much faster; write more content and build links. I was just too busy to do either of them. I don’t use this site for business use or anything like that, so it wasn’t that big of a deal to me, but if you do this for a site of your own I would definitely recommend you have plenty of content ready to publish on your site and a link building plan in place.

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