What to Know About Changing Your Domain on Showit

Why Would You Need to Change Your Domain?

It’s common (but not often recommended) for creatives to start using a new domain with a website redesign, because it often coincides with a new change in operations. Maybe you found a niche and want to make it clear what you offer. Or you changed your business name. You might’ve had a separate domain for your blog and now want everything on one domain –often recommended!

Whatever the reason, make sure you redirect your old domain properly to the new domain. This will avoid broken links or links to an old design from other websites that have your old domain linked from their own.

By redirecting your domain properly, you’ll help recoup the SEO value that you’ve already gained – and avoid making your SEO expert cry after all the work they’ve done.

Jump to the Solution

Redirecting a GoDaddy Domain

Trying to redirect a Godaddy domain without sending all your visitors to your home page is now a pain in the touchous. Especially if you want to move your blog posts from a blog subdomain to your main domain.

Why does this issue deserve its own blog post?

Because it not only seriously impacts the user experience but it can drastically affect your SEO especially if you have a large site or lots of blog posts that were ranking for useful keywords.

Problem: You can’t forward a Godaddy domain unless they host your site.

So if you want to change your website’s domain from awesomedomain.com to betterdomain.com or blog.domain.com to domain.com, then all your pages/posts, like awesomedomain.com/about would redirect to betterdomain.com instead of betterdomain.com/about.

And if you have Showit, you don’t even have the option of giving in to Godaddy’s hosting demands because your hosting is included in your monthly Showit subscription.

Not cool, Godaddy. I see you over there… trying to hold domains hostage to make us buy into your hosting. I, for one, am tired of this type of behavior. We’ll just go live with Mom! I mean… Google. 😳

How Does Redirecting a Domain WITHOUT a Forward Affect Your SEO?

• Visitors will be disappointed by a missing page or post when they try to access the old URLs you left in the dust. And this WILL happen, because they can likely find old links in your site’s content, in Google’s search results, or on another site that tried to share your awesome content.
• You essentially start over in ranking pages/posts with the old domain.
  Your old URLs were once respected by Google for all the visitor engagement and longstanding relevance.

Google might’ve granted those pages/posts with an increase in ranking for relevant search terms, which can help improve rankings for the rest of your site.

Unfortunately, without a proper redirect, the respect and rankings Google once had for your blog posts are now gone. You have to hope the new domain URLs can gain that same success as soon as possible.

Who are the real victims here?

Who suffers the most? Well, you because this is your business after all. But don’t overlook the suffering of three other innocent victims.

1. Your wannabe site visitors. Maybe even wannabe clients-who-wanted-to-give-you-money. They’re confused about a page they were sure was there before but now don’t know why they’re on the home page of a new domain.
   And since we all have short attention spans – thanks to being allowed to open ALL the tabs – they’ve moved on in their search and are considering your competitors. Or they probably just opened Facebook. And… they’re gone.
2. Google. Google’s type-A neuroses dislikes this kind of kerfuffle because the previously organized crawl map of your site that was painstakingly crawled, indexed, and confirmed by its own bot is now useless. About as useless as printed Mapquest directions from 10 years ago.
3. You. Instead of being able to seamlessly forward a previous domain and all the pages you worked so hard on, GoDaddy thinks you should give up some control of your own domain and pretend that it’s fine for all your old page and blog post URLs to redirect to the new domain’s home page.
   Tell GoDaddy that this is not fine and you’re not going to let them take your domain forward freedom.
4. Showit Support. Meanwhile, the poor Support team at Showit has to try to explain to users why hundreds of their blog posts from a previous domain cannot be redirected with a simple change to their domain settings that would only take a minute.

I’ve heard designers, Showit Support, and even other SEO pros recommend this as the last resort. Please don’t torture yourself! I have a much more efficient method. Ask me for help first before attempting this.

Solution: Use Google Domains for Simple Domain Redirect with Forwarding

Kick that clingy domain registrar to the curb!

The simplest option is to move your domain to Google Domains and accept your Google Overlord in exchange for full control of your own domain.

I’ve found that the simplest option is to move your domain to Google Domains and accept your Google Overlord. Then you can set up forwarding from your blog subdomain to your main domain without having to redirect 800 blog posts one by one. Because that would just be crazy.

Need help moving domains from Godaddy (or any other domain registrar?) to Google Domains? I’ll gladly move anyone away from a domain bully!