The arrival of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has changed the game on the World Wide Web. If you have unnecessary and unattractive long domain names with hyphens, you need not worry anymore as you can take advantage of the opportunity offered by new gTLDs such as .science, .agency, .plumbing, .boutique, .photography, etc. However, it is important that you take the correct steps to move your website to a new domain so that your SEO is not negatively affected.
When you buy your new gTLD, you should put up a “coming soon” page a few weeks before you transfer your files from the old site to the new one so search engine crawlers can index the new page. It will also let them know that the site is real and not parked. Then you need to transfer your files from the old site to the new one. Your web hosting service provider has tools for file transfer, just log in to your web hosting account or contact your service provider if you have any issues with this.
After moving all your files, you need to redirect search engines from your old domain to the new one. There are two types of redirects: the 302 redirect and the 301 redirect. The 302 redirect is temporary and tells search engines to read and use the content on the new site, but to keep checking the old one, as he will get over. But the 301 redirect is permanent. It informs search engines that the new domain should take the place of the old one, thereby transferring the authority, page ranking, and visitors from the old site to the new one.
When moving to a new gTLD, a 301 redirect is ideal and you should make sure to do the redirect for every page on the old site. To confirm the transfer, you can use a 301 verification submission. You must use the ‘address change tool’ in your Google Webmaster Console so that Google is informed that you have moved to a new site from an old one. It is also important to renew the change of address after 180 internal days.
Also, your backlinks should be updated on selected authority sites. You can contact webmasters and ask them to update their links. It is quite difficult to update all your backlinks but doing it with few authority sites is enough as your new site has taken the page rank of the old one via 310 redirect.
