With any redirection, if done right, all of your old URL’s that are listed in Google should automatically redirect to the appropriate page on the new domain, however, having your site indexed, or at least, have the ball rolling with getting your new domain indexed is still very important. There are many ways that you can aid this transition, and I stress that this can be very varied depending on the niche and the webmaster. Choose your own way, and take this as a basic guideline.

My advice is to first, submit your new domain to Google for crawling, then add the new domain to your Google Webmaster Tools, and submit a site map along with it. Another extremely important factor is to submit a change of address request through your Webmaster Tools. This is the fastest way to let Google know that you are redirecting from your old domain to the new domain. This is always a fast track way to make sure that your site is indexed, and in my last domain name transition, indexing of the home page took less than 24 hours.

At the same time, use all the social networks that you use to generate buzz about the impending domain change. Install some new features on the new domain that people will like, create a press release about your new domain name and these new features, and communicate on Social Networks about these changes and improvements.

Another very important factor here is that you will be changing to a new domain name that does not have any PR or even an Alexa rank. Although all of your previous back links will still redirect to the new domain, these will not count, as they are not back links directly to your new domain. So, you will also need to get active and create more and more back links to your new domain name. Contact sites that have created back links for you and ask them to update your links as well.

The most important thing here is to not rush into things too fast. Domain name propagation can take the better part of three days to complete, and in all essence, you should take as much time as you need to make sure that your new domain is indexed and that you generate buzz and back links. Not too much time though, as you don’t want to have pages indexed that are inaccessible for long time frames.

Lastly, do not forget your blog directory listings. It is vital that you do not overlook these, as they do generate a ton of links for most people, they are vital back links, and they are your front to the wider community who have not discovered your blog yet. Make sure to update these links a few days before the domain name transition so that they synchronize with the transition.

So, now you should have generated a ton of buzz, you should have at least some URL’s in the process of being indexed, and you are just about ready to go. Shortly, I will post the finale to this article which will cover how to redirect your old URL to your new domain name.

Remember, the most important thing here is to take your time, and do it right. A slip up here could cost you in the long run. And as always, if you have any tried and tested ways that have worked for you, please post them below.

Today we are going to learn how to move your WordPress Blog to a new domain. Changing your WordPress installation to a brand new domain is not the easiest of tasks. Unlike a standard website, the URL of your website is hard coded into your WordPress installation, meaning that even if you did copy the files from your WordPress install to a new domain, it would always point straight back at the old domain.

What we will be covering over the course of about three articles which will be produced over the course of this week is a strategic method in which to change your WordPress installation over to a new domain, whilst minimizing the impact that this has on your SEO, and your Google rankings. Part one, which we are seeing today, will cover how to change your WordPress blog to a new domain.

For a blogger, this is quite a scary thing to even attempt. Speaking from my own experience, at the moment, I am currently changing a sister site of Top WordPress Themes over to a new domain giving it a dot com rather than a dot info. The problem with this is that the dot com has no Alexa ranking, and it is not listed in Google at all yet, so the implications of doing this can be very severe. If not done right, I could lose income from Advertising, I could have trouble getting my Google rankings back, and much worse.

In this part, we will be covering the aspect of moving your WordPress files to a brand new domain and making those files work. This involves a few steps which may not entirely make sense until I go into further detail in the next parts to this article, but I do stress, there is a method in this madness, this is what works for me. I am sure that there are many other methods out there, and in part, this is why we have comments on this site enabled, so you can too share from your experience what has and hasn’t worked for you.

First thing that you are going to need to do is deny robots from accessing your new domain so early, as this could affect your search engine rankings. Create a new file on your new domain called robots.txt and include the following lines of text in this file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Now you are going to need to back up all of your files on your current installation on your current domain. This will include your SQL database and your files. Depending on what you have installed on your server, this may be as simple as downloading a backup from your c-panel, or downloading everything via ftp. Once you have everything backed up, upload your WordPress files to your public_html or root on your new domain, and make sure to set all of the same permissions as you had on your existing installation.

Depending on what you have installed on your hosting, or how your SQL is set up, this part may be a little tricky. You need to restore your SQL from the old domain on the new domain. In C-Panel and Direct Admin, this is as simple as creating a new SQL database (this will create a SQL table with the right prefix) then restore your backup on to the new SQL database. If you haven’t done so already, add your user, and then include these details in your wp_config.php file. This will tell your WordPress installation where the database is now located, so that it is not looking for the old installation anymore.

Whilst you have the wp_config.php file still open, we are going to fix that little problem of your WordPress install directing to the old domain. This is a surprisingly easy task. Simply add the following lines in your config file:

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://www.example.com’);

define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://www.example.com’);

You should now notice that if you navigate to your WordPress on your new domain, it should be working 100%. That is how simple it is, not as complex as it is made to sound. The only thing that needs to be fixed now is changing any links that you have created over the course of your blog being live that direct to the old domain. This is also a very simple fix. Download the Search and Replace plugin, and using this plug in, you can easily replace any references to your old URL with the new URL.

And that is it! That is how to move your WordPress blog to a new domain. Now, let’s not forget that there is a much more important aspect to this, and that is how to redirect from your old domain to the new domain without affecting your search engine rankings, and we will cover this over the next few days in more detail, including what we are going to do with that robots.txt file.

Again, if you have anything to add on this matter, please don’t be scared to use the comments!

To quote the announcement for this WordPress upgrade:

As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

We would recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.

So,who wouldnt want to upgrade if this is, mainly a security upgrade? I know who. Those who arent all that flash with WordPress. I mean, things can go wrong, what if I mess things up? I dont even know what I am doing! Simple answer to these people is this. Backup your wordpress, then follow the tutorial that I have posted below. It will do you the world of good, and prepare you for what to expect when the big upgrade happens when 2.9 is released!

This tutorial covers a manual installation from the ground up using c-panel to create the mySQL database, and also covers how to edit the wp-config file. In another tutorial that is coming up soon, I will cover the basics on how to change directory permissions (CHMOD) which will allow other functions such as installing of templates and plugins from the admin panel, and editing of raw code from the back end. Good luck!

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Setting up a blog, or a website should be an easy thing to do for everybody, as we are heading into a digital age, and having an online presence is just as vital as having an offline presence.

This is a very basic tutorial which will teach someone how to install WordPress starting from the ground up. This tutorial will only benefit those who have VPS or Dedicated hosting who are using WHM and C-panel with the Fantastico add on. For those who only use C-panel, this will give you the idea of what to do from about 1/3 of the way in. Good luck!

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