Submission of a Change of address (URL) for your Website

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After you have submitted your website's URL to all of the search engines, various hotlists, and guides, and have been listed in a number of individual website's hotlists, you may need to relocate your website and/or change your URL address. You may need to do this because your Internet Service Provider's service has deteriorated, or his prices have changed, or you have found another ISP which offer some features and/or pricing you find more attractive. Your website may also have become wildly successful and your current ISP cannot adequately handle the load of user accesses to your website. Whatever the reason for your change of address, this may cause problems for you.

Address Change with a Domain Name

You don't have a problem if you own your own domain name and that is what you submitted to the search engines. If you move from one ISP to another, your domain name goes with you, it is unchanged, and the change will be transparent and unnoticed by your visitors. The underlying IP address will change, but the Domain Name System (DNS) will be able to find your website by your domain name no matter where the new IP is located. That is the entire purpose of the DNS.

Address Change without a Domain Name

If you do not own your own InterNIC registered domain name as in www.your_domain_name.com you will have a problem. The problem is that as soon as you change your website to your new location none of the search engines or hotlist will be able to find your new URL. Your site is again invisible. This, you do not want. So what do you do about it?

Scope of the Address Change Problem

I experienced this problem when I made just such a change of URL address myself. I moved my website from America Online (AOL) to a local ISP, Best Internet Services. This change resulted in my website address being changed as follows:

Old Address: http://users.aol.com/mentorms/sanjose.htm

New Address: http://www.best.com/~mentorms/sanjose.htm

At the time of this move, my website was registered with about 30 search engines and listed on about 35 major hotlists. I knew that none of them would be able to locate my website when the change was implemented.

Advanced Planning for the Address Change

You must be aware of this problem and do some things in advance and some things afterwards to ameliorate the problems and made the transition as smooth as possible to allow everyone to find your website at it's new address. The following is suggested:

You were told to keep a notebook and to enter all your submissions in that notebook. This was for several reasons. One reason was to track the success of your efforts in getting your site listed. The other reason was, in the event you moved your website, you would be able to notify all those listing your site of your move. This may not enable you to know about all of the websites listing your websites, but you should know most of them, and especially the important major ones.

Knowing where your website is listed means you can notify each one of them individually of the URL address change. You will need to do this in a different manner depending on the update procedure for each of the search engines, and still a different manner for the hotlists. I will describe these processes below after addressing another matter.

Announcement Web Page

You should plan in advance of your URL move to place an announcement at your old URL that notifies visitors of your new address and provides a hotlink to your new address. You should also encourage them with this notice to bookmark, or hotlist, or favorite place, this new address. I would not implement an automatic transfer to the new address because I think it's distracting and most visitors wont use the feature anyway. This ensures that any visitors referred by the search engines and hotlists will get to your new address. You should plan on leaving this announcement on your old website for at least three (3) months. It will take up to that long for some of the address changes to take affect.

The announcement page will not be enough if they are also referencing sub-pages within your website. You can also set up forwarding addresses for these sub-pages if you are aware of them. But sometimes there will be just too many of them for this to be practical, or you simply wont even know about them. I mention this only for you to think about it and do something about it if it is important in respect to your website. If you are aware that a website is going to reference a sub-page in advance, you might warn them about the problems this will cause if your website is moved, or if you simply need to change the address of that page within your current location.

When to Send Out Notification of Address Change

The next issue to address is when to announce your address change. This should be done immediately upon the time of the change. Advance notice is not effective and will not work. You should change the location and announce the change as quickly thereafter. The best day to make the switch is on a Sunday night.

Announcements to Hotlists and Referral Sites

How you announce the change differs on whether it is to a hotlist or to a search engine. The hotlist announcement is the easiest. You should have a list of the e-mail addresses of all the hotlist that refer to your website. This is very easy if you have maintained a web page with reciprocal links to all the websites that reference your website.

You send an e-mail message announcing the change of address which has just been implemented. You should have the name of your website on one line, the old address on another line, and the new address on a third line. The new address should have nothing on that line except the new address. This will make it easier for the website administrator to copy the new address and paste it onto his page.

You should include in your announcement that you will have left a forwarding address page at the old address for a limited amount of time to allow them time to change the address, but that they should make the change as soon as possible. Most of them will change the address right away. But some will not change it at all for a variety of reasons. This means you will have to check them all in about two weeks and send out another notification to those who have not made the change. An example of an announcement follows:

To: Hotlist or referral website

Subject: New URL address for Silicon Valley Web Directory

We just changed to a new Internet Service Provider which means we now have a new URL address. We implemented this change to improve the service we provide to our users. We appreciate your providing a link to our service and would appreciate it even more if you would change your link to our new URL address as soon as possible. We will maintain a forwarding address at the old address for a limited period of time, but it is important that you change the referring link to our website as soon as possible. The name of our site is:

Silicon Valley Web Directory

Old URL: http://users.aol.com/mentorms/sanjose.htm

The new address is on the next line

http://www.best.com/~mentorms/sanjose.htm

Thanks for making this change and we apologize for the inconvenience it causes you.

When you check back in a few weeks, and find that a website has not changed to your new website address you might send them a friendly warning such as the following message.

I noticed today that you have a dead obsolete link on your home page to our home page:

Silicon Valley Web Directory

http://www.best.com/~mentorms/sanjose.htm

We tried to notify all referring sites of our change of URL address some time ago. Perhaps we missed you or you did not receive it for some reason.

In any event, an obsolete link is the same as no link so we will have to remove our link to your page from our page that is titled:

Check Out our References - Great Web Sites that Link to our Home Page

If you do not update and correct the link within the next week.

If after another two weeks they have still not linked to your new URL, delete your link to their website, notify them that you have done so, and asked them to let you know if and when they establish a link to your new address so that you can put your link back to their website on your page.

Announcements to Search Engines

Announcing the change in URL to search engines will vary with each search engine. A general e-mail announcement cannot be used. You will need to visit each search engine where your website is listed and see what their procedure is for changing your URL for your current listing. Some will be quick and easy, and even immediate, in making the change. Others will take weeks or months to implement the change. Some don't have a provision for making a change so all you can do is submit the new URL as you did for the original one you submitted.

If the search engine allows you to delete the old URL and add a new URL, you should do the following. Add the new URL. Once you have verified that the new URL is listed, then delete the old URL. Don't do both at once. Sometimes the old URL will be deleted immediately, but the new one will not be listed for weeks, or not at all. Don't take chances.

You must notify all the robots of your new address. If you do not, they will continue to list and/or search your old address for information about your website.

One of the reasons to keep a notebook that listed the date of your submission and the date it finally got listed is for you to know how long it took. This now becomes important when you make a change in your URL address. This allows you to have some idea of how long it might take for the address change to be implemented in a particular robot or directory. If it took six weeks to get listed, you can assume that it will probably take at least six weeks for the change to take place.

If you have been fortunate enough to have received awards and/or reviews for your website, it is very important to notify these websites first and to follow up on tracking the implementation of the changes at those websites. Probably the follow up should be done in one week.

Address Change to a Domain name on your current ISP

If you receive a domain name on your current ISP you may still want to announce a change of address even if the old address will still work. In most cases, the old URL will still function as it always did, but your visitor will be arriving at your new address. The change will be transparent to the visitor. The visitor who goes to this old address:

http://www.best.com/~mentorms/

will arrive at your new address:

http://www.mentorms.com/

Even though this happens, it is still a good ideal to go to the trouble of notifying everyone of the new address and ask them to change to the new address. You need to do this in anticipation that you may change to still another new ISP in the future. If you do, those who use the new address will go directly to the new address without a problem. But in the example the address shown, http://www.best.com/~mentorms, will no longer work.

The announcement of the change should follow the same form and process as in the previous section with a slightly different explanation.

Secrets of Searching the Web & Promoting Your Website