About domain names
-
Hello all. I am a new member of SEOmoz and liking it so far. This is my first post to you all (my new family).
I have a client who is starting a new company. We know for sure that he needs a new domain name. The question is two part:
Part One
Should he buy (is it worth the money) a parked domain that has some age to it. For example, a 9 or 10 year old domain that is getting "0" traffic and has no PR?
Or Should he just put that same say $1000 price tag back in his wallet and spend the money on a link building campaign to his new $9.95 domain name?
Part Two
We found a domain he really likes but only the ".co" ".net" and ".biz" are available. The .com belongs to a big company that has made a simple landing page from the .com domain name (that we really want) and will probably never let it go to us. So we will always be stuck without the .com portion of the domain registrations for this domain name if we go for it.
Question: a. Will we have difficulty competing for our own name recognition since the "big company" owns the landing page (even though it is a "0" PR page?
b. Can we live on only the .co extension or would we live to regret not getting all the extensions related to our domain name?
thanks everyone! I look forward to contributing here as well.
-
Buying a aged domain name has numerous problems, not least of which is that if the domain registration information changes and then shortly after the site is up, but completely different to what it had been in the past, Google may wipe any ranking clean and consider it a new site with a new owner.
You'll still benefit from any existing inbound links, but it's worth bearing in mind.
-
Personally, I think there is certainly some value in having a domain name with some age and would lean towards investing your money in that direction. Your client certainly doesn't want to abandon getting some links to this page so I would encourage them to keep some budget open for that but if I had to recommend one over the other I think I would recommend getting the domain name with 9-10 years of history.
Good luck!
-
Part One:
If the only reason you would spend $1000 on a domain is because of its age then i think it is a bad idea. Focus on a domain name that makes sense for the company and its mission, don't make ALL your decisions in the name of SEO. If it happens to have a targeted keyword in the domain or some old backlinks, then bonus.
Part Two:
Do you have to have a .com to rank well, of course not. However a few things to think about if you go with what you are thinking in part two...
- Is this client a direct competitor of the person who owns the .com?
If so, procede with caution, especially if it is a copyrighted or trade-marked term. - Is the .com targeting the same keywords as you?
If so, then you may be hurting yourself by confusing customers and end users.
Personally, without knowing any other details on the project, i would keep looking. Find a .com domain if that is what you truly want. Keep wordsmithing different variations and utilize Google's keyword tool to give suggestions. You'll find a winner eventually.
Good luck - Kyle
- Is this client a direct competitor of the person who owns the .com?
-
I would be hesitant to buy a parked domain - what if the previous owner had gotten themselves penalized in some way? You may end up having to work harder to overcome the effects of the penalty. I would spend the money on content or linkbuilding.
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
-
Considering Moving to New Domain and SEO
Hello, One of our sites has been using a domain since 2005 and is shown below. The domain is terrible for multiple reasons, hyphens and doesn't even reflect our actual company name. Not to mention its embarrassing when telling a customer to email us at support @ pro "dash, yes the hyphen" gift.... I wanted to change it long ago but feared it would hurt my SEO rankings. After taking Bruce Clay's training class back in 2004, we managed to rank top 10 for most targeted keywords. My ranking have slowly dropped over time due to neglect and decaying IBL's. We still rank for a few targeted keywords but it was just August of 2017 we were still top 10 but something happened and we dropped out of the top 100 right before our holiday season. We had to run Adwords and BingAds to supplement traffic this holiday season. So I am wondering before I restart my SEO efforts should I move the domain now before trying to build new content, IBL's, etc? I was always under the impression Google used domain trust a major factor which wasnt only IBL but also domain age. Our preferred domain I purchased from another owner and it has ZERO links to it. It was basically a parked domain with the "domain for sale" stuff. I am a little nervous about moving it over because Google didnt even have it in its index. I put up a coming soon page and hosted it on my server, same C Block, and requested a crawl from my webmaster console. I added some text to the new domain index page and it appears Google is showing results for our old domain! At first I thought it was duplicate content but its not Google obviously has deciphered current site is my old domain and is displaying the title and meta data from the old domain. I have never seen this before. Google cache shows the current domain the new domain url. A few questions: Will my site get sandboxed after 301 redirecting and going webmaster console move features etc? Does this reset the trust factors? I have read examples in my research where some people say it only took a few weeks and everything was back to normal and others that have said it took years. Any experience or insight is greatly appreciated. I am currently relearning SEO and going over the SEO tutorial articles provided on moz. Thanks again! New Domain - matches our company name, no hyphens, better branding http://www.giftbasketpros.com/ Google index https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.giftbasketpros.com Current Domain, since 2005, has ranked well for years until this summer http://www.pro-gift-baskets.com/
Branding | | DMAC441 -
Why is Google appending a different website's brand name to the end of SERP title?
I've recently been shown some SERP results where Google is appending a different website's brand name to the end of the SERP title. It's actually rewriting the brand's name to that of the other website. (This is obviously not ideal.) Why would this be? The other website doesn't even stock the same product, so there shouldn't be any confusion there. But even if it did, many websites stock the same products. Just confusing...
Branding | | Ria_1 -
Pros/Cons on Where to Host Stores for Ecommerce Solution Provider (subdomain vs. throwaway domain, etc)
Hello! Does anyone have any experience with the pros/cons for where to host storefronts as an ecommerce solution provider. I'm looking for a recommendation on where to house the stores/websites people create with our software (think of us like a shopify/squarespace). What are the pros & cons of creating stores on the main domain name “brand.com” versus buying a new top level domain name who’s only purpose will be to hold all the subdomains, such as “mybrand.com”, or even “.my.brand.com”. store.brand.com <— subdomain our our primary domain
Branding | | andrewmeyer
store.my.brand.com <— subdomain of a subdomain
store.mybrand.com <— subdomain of a throw-away domain Weebly/Squarespace/Tictail go with the first option (store**.weebly.com** and store.squarespace.com). Shopify goes with the 3rd option (store.myshopify.com) Are there any advantages or disadvantages to one or the other? Am I missing any other options? Thanks in advance!0 -
A competitor has a search term in their brand name - Can we outrank them for that search term?
Hi Mozzers, I have been putting a lot of work into ranking for a certain search term. We have managed to get our homepage to #3 for that search term. #1 is a comparison site, so I am not overly fussed with beating them - we probably won't. But we do want to hit #2 and in all fairness, we have better content and have put more into our SEO efforts than the current #2. I think they are ranking so strongly because their brand name is exactly that search term with the word "go" in front of it. Google even spits out their extra links under the result as if it was a branded result. I know EMD's don't hold much weight any more so I'm guessing this is all to do with their clever brand name choice. My question is, can you outrank a competitor like that? If you're selling wooden rocking horses and your company is called toybox.com for example, but your competitor is called GoWoodenRockingHorses and their domain is www.gowoodenrockinghorses.com, can toybox.com ever outrank them for the search term "wooden rocking horses"? Hope this makes sense, please private mail me for more info if you need it! Cheers, Jamie
Branding | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Changing Social Media Profiles Name
Hi Mozzers, A client is thinking about changing their social media handles to shorten them to just their brand name as opposed to brand name plus the word 'apparel'. What is the implications of doing this and does the link change from facebook/brand-apparel or does the URL stay the same? Thanks Gareth
Branding | | Bush_JSM0 -
International domain query
my client is a financial services company with some ccTLDs for brand name but does not own the .com eg: brandname.ch, brandname.ro etc we need to launch a brand UK site plus a global site. should we go for another name on the .com: brandname_financial.com_, and: brandname_financial.ch_, brandname_financial.ro_ etc or could we go for instead brandname.uk.com and brandname.eu.com? i'm worried the owner of brandname.com will build a site and out rank us.....however the alternative is a longer url but owning the .com hope that makes sense and any advice would be gladly received! Many thanks
Branding | | bisibee10 -
Which domain would you choose?
This is more of a survey than anything. If your name was Jeremy Parker, and you were to start a personal blog/site. Assuming jeremyparker.com was not available, which domain would you go with? 1. jeremyparker.net 2. jeremy-parker.com 3. jerpark.com 4. Other. From an SEO standpoint it would be unlikely to make a difference. But from a branding standpoint. Which one would you perceive to be best? Thanks.
Branding | | scotennis0 -
Should your company's name be in the title tag of your website?
First of all, I would like to provide some background information. Our company is small. We are just now getting into SEO research and have been improving over a couple months of research. We are somewhere in the 500,000's in the world rankings. From what I understand, the title tag provides a great amount of weight to whatever keywords you set up. The words in the title tag are supposed to represent keywords that you want to be high in the search engines for, correct? Well, in our title tag, we have the name of our company. To me, this is a waste of space. No one is going to go to Google and search for our company's name because we are not that widely known. Looking back at our search history for customers, there has not been a single search for the company name. What someone is telling me, is that when we put our link somewhere, having the name of our company in the title tag strengthens the "link juice" we get from those links. Is this correct, or is it worth trashing the company name for another keyword to optimize?
Branding | | FrontlineMobility0