It’s no secret that we at The Kingdom are big fans of HubSpot. In fact, we’re Adelaide’s only HubSpot specialists and we’ve taken that expertise to service clients across the globe. There are a lot of reasons why we love HubSpot, from its powerful social media tools to the way it blows WordPress out of the water when it comes to website hosting.
It’s easy to go on and on about how great HubSpot is because it really is a platform that makes it easy to manage and promote your digital marketing. From sending beautiful, mobile responsive emails to managing the back end analytics and settings of your site, HubSpot makes it a snap to keep your digital assets working well and looking great.
Today, we’ll cover one of the lesser-discussed topics in the world of HubSpot: what happens when you change your primary domain in HubSpot? Whether your business has been bought by a new company (congratulations!) or you’re undergoing a rebranding, there are many reasons why a business might choose to change their website’s domain. But how do you make sure you don’t lose SEO value when you change domains? What steps does it take to bring your site back to life? How does HubSpot handle all these changing links?
Rest assured that we are here to help you, no matter what your HubSpot problems are.
And if any of the following answers prompt more questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via live chat, social media, or email. We’re happy to answer any of your HubSpot or inbound marketing questions.
Changing Your Primary Domain in HubSpot
Redirecting an Old Domain to a New Domain
What should you do to move all of your existing links to a new URL?
Changing your domain over can be a complicated process with other domain management tools. Luckily, HubSpot makes this process very simple. You simply update your domain manager with the new domain and choose if it will host your site, landing pages, blog, or email. HubSpot then automatically creates what are called 301 redirects from your old domain to the new.
This process looks like:
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Add the new domain into the COS and set up to redirect to the existing domain
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Setup CNAME and HTTPS for the new domain
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Change the Pages, Blogs, Email, and Landing Pages content options over to the new domain
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Set up the old domain to redirect to the new domain
This will take a URL and redirect to the same existing content but only replace the domain.
www.mydomain.com/mypage → www.newdomain.net/mypage
How Redirects Impact Your SEO
Search engines split a URL up into five distinct sections:
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Protocol (http:// or https://)
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Subdomain (www. or pages. or info.)
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Domain (mydomain.com)
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Path (/mypage)
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Query String (?video=100)
Changing the subdomain and domain section over to a new subdomain and domain combination should not result in a loss of traffic in regards to page rankings against the domain.
However, the new domain name will have different search criteria associated with it, invoke different primary keywords (e.g. TheKingdom vs. MyRedApples will result in drastically different results even if the former was changed to the latter).
Will My Google Rankings and SEO Suffer Because of 301 Redirects?
Good news! The answer is no, not anymore.
Google used to ‘penalise’ 301 redirects with approximately a reduction in 15% of traffic. This was caused by Google treating a 301 redirect with the same weight as if you had a hyperlink with the same page relevance as the current page.
Now, though, Google now treats 301, 302 and 307 redirects with the same weight and no longer penalises them.
This has happened due to a huge magnitude of poorly designed CMS and user error creating 302 redirects that were killing the SEO of pages, especially for HTTP → HTTPS redirects. So now your 301 redirects don’t negatively impact your SEO at all. You should know, though, that there isn’t any set timeline on when Google will recrawl your site. Make sure your don’t have any broken links and consider submitting a sitemap to Google in the webmaster tools section.
[image https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo]
How to Set up 301 Redirects without HubSpot
If you’re looking to manage these redirects without HubSpot, you may need a bit more expertise. At The Kingdom, we’ve worked with clients who not only needed to update their primary domain to something new [one redirect] but then redirect that page to a different site [a second redirect]. In this case, you may consider setting up a server which is protocol, subdomain, path, query agnostic to achieve good 301 redirects.
In this case, we’d recommend using an automatically allocated Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, which is perfect for this type of application. You would then redirect the http://mydomain to https://mydomain and also smartly forward to https://www.mynewdomain, always keeping the minimum number of hops to one.
Potential Problems With Setting Up 301 Redirects
That said, there are some potential issues with updating your domains with 301 redirects. Websites are loading slow enough as it is, for the large part search engines won’t need to worry about ping times. Importantly, however, your short term organic traffic might suffer from increased latency. This latency issue can be mitigated the by deploying two or more redirect servers in the US, Europe and Singapore to reduce TTFB [time to first byte].
Getting Started with 301 Redirects
So there you have it – the best way to change your domain in HubSpot. While this process might seem quite complicated, it really is a fairly simple process once you get going. And, of course, there are a wealth of resources available to you should you have questions. In addition to HubSpot’s comprehensive help article, you can also reach out direct to HubSpot Support by clicking the “Help” icon in the bottom right of your HubSpot portal. If you have specific questions for us, please feel free to contact us via live chat, email, or on social media.
If you would like to learn more about the technical aspects of creating a well-run HubSpot site, you may enjoy our eBook HubSpot vs WordPress. Or you may enjoy reading this blog about "White Hat SEO" or this blog on how to improve SEO.
Sources
Google FAQ Answered by John Mueller https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PY1xCWbeDVC
If my site is hosted on HubSpot, can I change its domain? https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/cos-general/if-my-site-is-hosted-on-hubspot-can-i-change-its-domain
What do I need to change in HubSpot if my website domain has changed? https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/cos-general/what-do-i-need-to-change-in-hubspot-if-my-website-domain-has-changed
