Impact of moving all the domain from .net to .com
-
Hi,
We are thinking of moving a domain from a .net extension to a .com because of internal political reason.
It's a french website with 3 000 pages.The organic trafic is 65 % from France and 35 % from Canada. We have decent rankings and we have around 150 000 organic visits/month.
For sure,if we move the site, we will do all the rigth 301 redirect. We will also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the new location of the site.
But even if we do all the best practices. What would be the impact of changing the extension.
Is anyone had some experience with this ? I will really like to have your opinion on this.
Thanks
Rick
-
changing from .com to .net is the same as changing your domain name. It should be done only when absolutely necessary, unless the current site is not established and not ranking.
-
Thanks Rick
Really appreciate that you share your experience !
-
I would move just to get off of the .net.
-
Hola,
We've moved a number of sites for similar political reasons. It's always frustrating as an SEO!
We almost always have seen some drop-off for obvious reasons. Sometimes that drop-off has been less 5%, other times closer to 30% depending on the precautions that business owners were willing to take. Sounds like you're going to do redirects and do the webmaster tools request. 2 tips:
- Plan to hold on to the .net domain for a long time and keep the redirects in place. Our worst results were situations where for some reason, the business owner would not (refused to/could not/whatever reason) hold on to the old domain name.
- Try to find a feasible/scalble way to get your top-linkers to move to the new domain. In a perfect world, you'd get most your inbound links updated. This can take some time but seems to help minimize the impact and be better in the long-run. This is an absolute waste of times in some cases (way too inefficient) but if you have or can establish solid relationships, get those links updated!
Best of luck. It's not an ideal situation but usually isn't the end of the world if you're in it for the long haul (unless your in a crazy competitive market)!
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
-
New domain wipes out domain authority
A client wanted to change their domain name, which we have now done. The site content itself is exactly the same. We put 301 redirect links in so that Google searchers would redirect from the old site to the new one. However Moz then said that it couldn't crawl the old domain because of the redirects and advised creating a brand new campaign for the new domain. We have done this but now Moz says that the domain authority of the new site is 2 (it was 14 on the old domain). Specifics are:
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti
old domain: https://ryemeadcleaning.co.uk
new domain: https://ryemeadgroup.co.uk So basically it seems like we're starting again from scratch with the new domain and all the SEO from the old domain has been lost? Have we done it wrong?0 -
How to create sitemap for example.com and blog.example.com ?
Hi I try to create sitemap for www.example.com, this website has link www.blog.example.com. after creating the sitemap using different tool. the sitemap not include www.blog.example.com and its relative files how can i get both example.com and blog.example.com in one sitemap
Technical SEO | | fogtheagency0 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Redirect our www.website.com to website. Com/target-keyword
Dear moz community I have been analyzing the websites that rank in top 20 for our target keywords. All of the top 20 sites except us have their websites re directing to websites.com/target keyword. This is due to probably because they have multiple city's and one of the target keywords term is cityname + word. My question is and idea - make a 301 to our www.website.com to /city-keyword and start linking to that page with new links. Would that bring any benefit? Seems that it's a very strong ranking signal. Any threats that I must take into account? We currently rank as #9
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
2 domains for one website
Hi, I was wondering: i have 2 domains. One is the name of the company the other one is an exact match domain. There is only one website. If I use both domains for this website which one will rank? How google react to website configured like that? Regards
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
Using both .co.uk and .com
Hello a client has launched a website with both the .com and .co.uk The content is identical. I understand that you should add rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to the code. However, will there be a problem with the identical content? It would be hard to localise the content to one country. I understand why the client has got both domains, particularly the UK one but the actual content is not specific to one country. It is written for English speaking customers really. Also what about links? In this case do you need to build two sets of links to make them both rank? Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
What should I set my domain setting to?
In Google Wemnaster tools, I have the option to set it to either have as default the "www" or without it. What are the pros and cons of one way or the other . . . or is this a way more complicated question/can of worms I have opened?
Technical SEO | | damon12120 -
I have both a ".net" and a ".com" address for the Same Website.....
I have mysite.net and mysite.com......They are both the same age, however, we always had it so that the mysite.com address forwarded to the mysite.net address. The mysite.net address was our main address forever. We recently reversed that and made the mysite.com address the main address and just have mysite.net forward to the mysite.com address. I'm wondering if this change will affect our rankings since a lot of the backlinks we've acquired are actually pointing to mysite.net and not mysite.com (our new main address)???
Technical SEO | | B24Group0