: The danger of changing the domain of your portfolio So I have a online portfolio that is available at mervin-ux-portfolio.com but I am planning to change hosts since the current host I am hosting

@Samaraweera270

If you're not dependent on your site for work and income, then being down for a couple of weeks might not be so bad, although that depends to some extent on what HTTP status code is served during that time. I'd check into that.

Migrating to a new site is actually not too big of a deal. I'd recommend getting crawling software (Xenu, Screaming Frog) to get a list of all your site's pages. Write 301 redirects that will redirect each page to its new location. Thus there's no duplication issue, existing backlinks are preserved, most PageRank is transferred, etc.

The only problem is whether your arrangement with your host will leave you with control of the old domain for long enough to make this effective. Anyway, it's a bit long winded, but this article is a decent overview of an effective migration process: www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

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@Ann8826881

Changing your domain will essentially reset your SEO as well as downgrade it as (at least for a time) Google will likely mark your websites content as duplicate (as both old & new domains have shown new content) - also any existing links will die (see #2 below for how to resolve that)

If you want to use a new domain

You can either:


Setup a robots.txt on the new domain that tells google to ignore the entire site - this will avoid the duplicate content issue
Allow google to index your new domain, but when your old domain comes live again, setup a 301 redirect to tell google (and old urls) to redirect to your new domain (as is explained here stackoverflow.com/questions/1945568/htaccess-redirect-all-pages-to-new-domain/7578810#7578810)

On another note

Google uses domain age in SEO rankings and it's a relatively good ranking factor as it's one that cannot be "hacked" or gamed - so an older domain will rank better for you overall ;)

s'my 2 cents.

If I were you, I'd go for option #1 and keep my incoming links & existing seo score(s)

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@Vandalay111

Being down for two weeks would be better then having to optimize a brand new site for SEM & SEO.

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