Your Domains and DNS

Domain changes and Multiple Domains

Starting the Process

Domain names are purchased from companies known as domain registrars. Some domains such as .gov (/www.dotgov.gov) and .us (www.neustar.us) must stay with these organizations while others can be moved or bought from other companies.

Some useful information that clients may find useful in choosing their new domain:

The first thing that you have to do is to acquire a new domain. Note that since the TLD of the domain (.com, .fr, .gr, .de etc) is often used as a GEO location signal, using a new TLD can affect your rankings.

Also be extra careful when you purchase an aged domain. There is always the risk that the given domain is banned by one of the major search engines. Do a bit of research on the history of the domain, check the previous WHOIS records, check if the domain has any indexed pages on the search engines, use Archive.org to see how the website used to look in the past etc. Also add the new domain in Google’s & Bing’s Webmaster Tools in order to see their statistics and check whether you have received any warnings about those websites. If you believe that the domain has been banned due to spamming, filing a reconsideration request can be a good idea before you transfer your website.

Uploading  a “coming soon” page can be a big help in smoothing out the process. By uploading even a single HTML page on your new domain few weeks before moving to it you allow search engines to crawl and index the new website. Moreover have in mind that most search engines try to detect the parked domains by using several classifiers. As a result by placing in your pages some content and by mentioning that this will be the location of the new website you help search engines detect that your new domain is a real website and not a parked one.

Handling the Consequences of Changing Domain Names

1. Use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Console

One thing that you should do is use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Console. After registering both the old and the new website to Google Webmaster tools you should specify that the old one has been transferred to the new address. The Change of Address tool works at the site level, which means that it clearly helps Google understand that this transition happened for the whole domain and not for specific pages of your site.

2. Update the important Backlinks

Even though the 301 redirects are supposed to pass most of the PageRank and anchor text data, it is strongly recommended to try to update the most important backlinks (links from reputable sources with high PageRank) that point to your old website and link directly to the new pages. Of course you don’t have to contact all the webmasters that link to your website, but instead focus only on the most important ones. In order to get a list of all the Backlinks of your website you can use the Backlink Analyzer tool or Google Webmaster Tools console.

 http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-change-your-do...

If you have both old domain and new domain remain active and point to the same IP, the Friendly URLs will still function, but at the cost of diluting the sites search rankings due to the search engines realizing the duplication and attempting to discard the duplicate. This means you only get credit for some of the visits.

For proper SEO you setup a 301 redirect on the server. This informs the search engines that the site has been moved to the new domain and credit for the link is properly recorded by the search engine. As it turns out, if there is a Friendly URL involved in a 301 redirect, our CMS does not pick up the information and the visitor will land on the homepage.

Finding Domain Information

To find out information about a domain you do a "whois" lookup. This will usually tell you who owns the domain, what company it resides at and the contact information of the person who has access to the account. This information will be obfuscated if the domain owner has chosen to have privacy enabled.

Whois sites:

https://whois.icann.org/en

http://whois.domaintools.com/

https://www.dotgov.gov/portal/web/dotgov/whois

DNS Information

Your domain is the name the world of the internet knows you by, but no one knows how to find you. That is what DNS does by having a record of where your’ webserver, email or any other services that use your domain are located.

Here is a simple version of how this works. If someone is looking for www.visioninternet.com and their computer does not know where to find this, they go to the domain first. At the domain there will be an entry that says where to find the next set of directions, known as DNS (domain name system)

In the case of visioninternet.com, they visitor is told to go to Amazon to find the DNS, and there they look to get directions to the website. They are told the address is 38.106.4.34 and now they can find the site.

Domain points to DNS and DNS points to website a website address (IP).

So Why is this Important Now?

 Pointing the DNS to your new site is the final step to switching over. To do this you need to have the credentials to log into the site such as Amazon or GoDaddy that contains your DNS. Some organizations use outdated DNS services that do not have a web interface to make quick updates and this should be taken into account in a launch schedule.

Tools: https://www.ultratools.com/tools/dnsLookup | https://www.whatsmydns.net/

Record Types

"A" : Enter the domain "www.visioninternet.com" will give the the IP address (IPv4)

"CNAME" : This will tell you the true ("canonical") name. Useful when you have a subdomain or alias is used so you can find the actual domain name.

"PTR" : A reverse lookup. Enter the IP address to see all domains that point to that IP. Uber useful!

"NS" : Enter www.visioninternet.com" to see who controls the domain.

"SOA" : Will return primary name server, email of domain admin and the domain serial number. Handy stuff.

Heavy duty information: https://www.robtex.net/