Solved Can I retain my backlinks if I move my site from myVR

[sherry woodhouse]

Hello.
My domain name points to my myVR site.
I want to look into getting some backlinks for my site to help it rank better.

Question, if I leave myVR in the future, do my backlinks stay with my site. I mean, will the backlinks from my current domain be able to be redirected to the new site?
Thanks
Sherry

[Jonathan Murray]

Hi Sherry!

Sorry for the delay in responding. I’m not an SEO expert, but I believe this question is within my comfort zone!

Back links are a great idea, and critical to any SEO strategy. If set up properly, your backlinks should be independent of the technology you use for your website.

A backlink is basically a link on a third party website that directs to a page on your website. You would just need to make sure that the link doesn’t break if you were ever to change your website. But that’s entirely within your control.

For example, if I get a third party website to link to the “Local Info” section of my property’s website, I’d have the backlink link to that page on my website, which is: https://www.sonomasquarecottage.com/local/. If I ever remove this page, without setting up a redirect (more on this in a second), then that backlink would break.

That backlink just needs to remain intact once established. So, if you were ever going to change your website, you’d want to make sure that you keep that page (with the same URL). Or, if you removed or moved it, you’d want to set up redirects to other pages so that the links don’t break (MyVR has a tool to do this for our website users).

If you ever moved away from MyVR for the website, you’ll just want to make sure you have a page at this URL on your new website, or that you have a redirect set up so that old URL doesn’t fail. The same is true for someone coming into MyVR from another website. Because you’re using a custom domain, this is entirely within your control. A redirect maintains most of your ‘SEO juice’, but is not as good as having the same URL/page on your new site.

You typically want to do this and have it ready before you turn off your old website. You want to avoid search engines crawling and finding that your backlink no longer works. I believe that once they do this, they stop checking it, so you lose out on the work you did.

So in summary:

• backlinks are independent of the technology you’re using for the website
• you can move from one technology to another and maintain the backlinks, but you need to set up the new pages (at the same URL) or set up redirects before taking down your old website
• MyVR has built tools to make this easy for people moving onto our websites from other websites

Hope that helps!

[Conrad O'Connell]

Jon has it right on in my opinion!

If you keep and hold your domain, that’s like owning the title to a car or the deed to a property. Even if you were to switch platforms at some point in the future, you can easily setup redirects so any inbound links don’t have any issues.