Migrating a website to a new domain is not always easy and is often the cause of many a headache for webmasters. Moving from an old established domain with authority to a fresh new domain without any history will have a massive negative impact on the sites organic performance if there is not a proper SEO site migration plan. Often with a site migration comes a completely new design, structure, cms and possibly host - so there are many things to consider to make the transition smooth for both the user and from an SEO perspective.

Even with an SEO site migration plan in place, a move is not always completely trouble free as Econsultancy shared in a recent blog post. Econsultancy launched a new site after a subtle name change from E-consultancy to Econsultancy and subsequently moved from www.e-consultancy.com to a new domain http://econsultancy.com.

There is a great level of detail shared by Econsultancy in the processes behind the SEO migration to their new site and it's impact on natural performance. What makes this particulary fascinating is that it not only highlights some of the issues you can experience in moving domains, but also the complexities involved in targeting globally from a single domain. I won't delve into these now as there are a number of comments in the post which discuss these in more detail.

A phased approach is often the best and easiest way to diagnose any potential problems along the way but it is not always an option for all businesses. Unfortunately you cannot flick a switch with the search engines to let them know you have moved to a new site and all websites are unique, so timescales are not always the same in each case. But there are some best practices that you can follow to make the transition as trouble free as possible. Google have provided some best practice guidelines for moving to a new site without hurting your websites performance in the search results.

Whether you are a webmaster or search marketeer, the shared experiences from Econsultancy offer a great insight into site migration and SEO is definitely a case study I would recommend keeping an eye on.