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
-
Moving to TLS and disavow file
I'm considering the move to TLS/SSL obviously will be setting up the version in Search Console, do I need to re-upload the disavowal file previously generated before the move? Look forward to your response.
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
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 -
Specific Domain Migration Question
My company will be taking over an ecommerce site that is built to get local city/state traffic where the competition is slim to none for the given keyword. This site gets 2500+ visits per day, and we're looking to maintain and eventually grow that traffic. We would like to move that site onto our ecommerce platform which will force URL change and of every 'keyword' city/state page on the site. We're undecided whether to keep it on an unfamiliar platform that already gets traffic or to move it and possibly face the 404's or weeks of redirecting a single keyword-city/state page to another. Any advice or insight would be great!
Technical SEO | | BMac540 -
Backlinks go to "example.com" our homepage is "example.com/default.html" am I losing internal link power?
Hey everyone! Thanks again for everybodies contributions to my questions over the last few months. As the title states, our homepage is at "example.com/default.html" but everybody that backlinks to us (as expected) to "example.com" does that mean that I am probably losing a lot of the power of my links??
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Subdomain and Domain Rankings
I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league) when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks
Technical SEO | | bThere0 -
Two spelling of a domain
I have a customer with two spellings of their domain name. I set up an account for spelling A and forwarded all the email boxes to spelling B becuase people tend to remember spelling A more of the time. Spelling B is the real web site. I also want any www. traffic for spelling A to go to spelling B so I used this .htaccess file in the root of spelling A Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | freestone
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.B.com/$1 [R=301,L] I use to just forward A to B from the registrar but made this change to allow for email spelled either way. My question is does this create a duplicate site issue for the bots? Is this in anyway an SEO negative and if so is there a better way to do this. Thanks jw0 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0
