SEO Benefit/Liability of changing URLs of a 2 year old site
-
I sell RV Parts online. Our organization is called The ROUTE 66 RV Network, so we brand everything around ROUTE 66. When we launched our store 2 years ago, we launched it with the domain:
We have a PR of 2, and we have been doing an SEO linkbuilding campaign ever since it has been around.
Our primary keyword that we are trying to rank for is RV PARTS
We also own the domain:
My question is:
Is there a significant benefit to switching our URL to RVPARTS66.COM? Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? If so, what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain?
We are in the process of a complete site overhaul which will launch in a couple weeks, so if there is ever a time to switch domains, the time is now.
Thanks!
jc
-
Do you have any kind of basis for how much it will benefit the search engine rankings?
If you were moving from "parts.com" to "carparts.com" it is likely you would see a noticeable improvement for exact match searches.
Moving from parts66.com to rvparts66.com presents a complication. Even an "rv parts" search would not be an exact match as you have the "66" included in the domain name. Your site will never have an Exact Match Domain which receives the highest benefit. Instead you would be seeking to move from a partial match domain to a better partial match domain, and the improvement may not be noticeable.
I would suggest substantial testing and research prior to making any change. I am not aware of any case studies on a change similar to the one you are considering.
-
Thanks for the response Ryan. Do you have any kind of basis for how much it will benefit the search engine rankings? A little? A lot?
I have spoken with my programmers and there is not really a technical challenge in switching domains, I am just trying to get some sort of expectation...we are currently on page 2 (~rank of 13) for RV Parts on GOogle and Bing...
What could I expect from this change?
Thanks again for your response.
jc
-
** Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? **
Yes. You will receive a benefit on all searches using that keyword.
Your current URL already has "parts" in it. By adding "rv" to the URL, your ranking will be boosted on any search for "rv" and especially for "rv parts", but you will not do as well for "parts" without "rv" anymore.
what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain?
If you decide to make the change, you should use a 301 redirect. All traffic and links will be redirected from the old site to the new site. Your links will retain 90%+ of their value for the new site. When possible, update the links so you can keep 100% of their value.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What Can I Do To Improve The SEO of My Site?
We have a website that is ranking okay but we can't seem to get past #6 or #7 for a specific national keyword, "self storage software". We are working on a more effective back-linking strategy right now, but we really are having a hard time identifying steps to take besides that. If anyone can help me out and give me some suggestions I would be very appreciative. Maybe even seeing a competitive analysis from someone else would help catch something that I am not seeing. Website is www.storageunitsoftware.com Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | kenturley0 -
Change URL or use Canonicals and Redirects?
We just completed a conclusive a/b test on a client's landing page. The new page saw a 30% bump in conversions, yay! Now what? Option 1: Change the url of the new page to that of the old page, retire the old page. Option 2: Redirect the old page and anything that was pointing to it to the new page, make the new page the canonical. I'm afraid of option 1 because I think Google's WTF penalty will be a bit harsher than option 2, but I wanted to sanity check that here. Any thoughts or experienced advice would be very appreciated!
Technical SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Should I change by URL's
I started with a static website and then moved to Wordpress. At the time I had a few hundred pages and wanted to keep the same URL structure so I use a plugin that adds .html to every page. Should I change the structure to a more common URL structure and do 301 directs from the .html page to the regular page?
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Https enabled site with seo issues
Hello, Is there a problem with seo bots etc to crawl and rank my wesbite well if the entire site is https enabled? We have a sign in button which results on the next page being https along with the main homepage and all other pages are https enabled. Any major setbacks to the seo strategies? How do I overcome these issues?
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
Block /tag/ or not?
I've asked this question in another area but now i want to ask it as a bigger question. Do we block /tag/ with robots.txt or not. Here's why I ask: My wordpress site does not block /tag/ and I have many /tag/ results in the top 10 results of Google. Have for months. The question is, does Google see /tag/ on WordPress as duplicate content? SEOMoz says it's duplicate content but it's a tag. It's not really content per say. I'm all for optimizing my site but Google is not penalizing me for /tag/ results. I don't want to block /tag/ if Google is not seeing it as duplicate content for only one reason and that's because I have many results in the top 10 on G. So, can someone who knows more about this weigh in on the subject for I really would like a accurate answer. Thanks in advance...
Technical SEO | | MyAllenMedia0 -
What do I do with an old site when a new one is built?
I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content. He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2. Our question is, what do we do with the old site? Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages? Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site? He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO. What is his best course of action? Thanks for your replies.
Technical SEO | | smartlinksolutions0