How Do Avoid Drops in SEO Values During Site Migrations
There might come a point in your time as a developer that you're tasked with relocating a website domain while attempting to maintain the SEO value of each page contained therein. This isn't such a difficult process when you know what you're doing, but that's kind of the issue here: There aren't many well-explained pages on the Internet to show you how it's done correctly. Most of them try to describe the beginning and the end points with no intelligible content to fill the middle with, which is why I'm here today to relay a little help and hopefully be the one to show you how it's done.
These aren't chronological steps; rather, it's a checklist that you fulfill in whatever order you see fit. Let's go over everything you'll need to do:
Perform a 301 redirect on an even 1:1 relevance ratio between the old and new sites. Do this on the page level, not the whole domain.
Copy and paste all of the metadata and content to the new site, but make sure the changes aren't too drastic from the outset since the new domain may not reflect them nicely.
Google has a site migration tool, believe it or not. Make use of this to notify Google of the migration so they can adjust values on their end to reflect the changes.
Don't change the GA code. Just keep it the same as it was on the old site.
Ensure that your sitemaps are updated along with any related metrics that were included in your old domain.
You'll need to comb through all of your content to be sure that every reference point to the old domain is updated to reflect the new one. During this process, also ensure that your new domain is architecturally updated.
Open up GSC, and fetch and submit redirected URLs on the old domain.
Keep tabs on the old domain to make sure that all traffic leading to it is successfully redirected. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/8dnx49/howtoconductsitemigrationwithoutlosing_seo/.