Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names
-
For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com
www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make.
As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension.
Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes?
Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide).
Best regards,
Astrid Groeneveld
-
Astrid,
David is right; you will put almost the entire backlinks' profile of .net at risk. The quantum of the risk and the subsequent results are factors that nobody would be able to predict with perfection.
-
Hi Astrid,
It could be argued that .com domains correlate better with higher rankings that .net domains, however there is no certainty as to whether the search engines use this domain distinction as a ranking factor (and if so, how much weight it holds in their overall algorithm)
It could also be argued that a .com domain carries more trust from a brand perspective, so there is an overall marketing case to be put forward for switching.
However...
From an SEO point of view, any potential benefit you'd receive from switching to a .com (which in my opinion would be very little) would be counter-acted (and possible outweighed) by the link juice you'd lose from 301'ing your existing domain and all the links it's received over the years. There is no exact figure on what kind of link power you'd lose, but have a read on the test on losing link juice from a 301 redirect.
So as an SEO excercise, I would say you'll receive very little benefit from switching, and more likely you would see rankings drop in the short-medium term. It could be a different story from a marketing perspective, but whoever is making the decision should be aware of the SEO consequences.
Thanks
David
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
-
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?
Hi, Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info. The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months. Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter. Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name? Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Removing poor domain authority backlinks worth it?
Hey Moz, I am working with a client on more advanced SEO tactics. This client has a reputable domain authority of 67 and 50,000+ backlinks. We're wanting to continue SEO efforts and stay on top of any bad backlinks that may arise. Would it be worth asking websites (below 20 domain authority) to remove our links? Then, use the disavow tool if they do not respond. Is this a common SEO practice for continued advanced efforts? Also, what would your domain authority benchmark be? I used 20 just as an example. Thanks so much for your help. Cole
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColeLusby1 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Buying a banned domain
Hello all, I've found a exact match keyword domain that I'm able to buy. Problem is that I'm under the impression it might have been banned by google, currently it is only showing adsense without content. The site can't be found using the cache: or site: parameters in Google and the PR is 0. What are your experiences on buying a banned domain and how can I double check if the domain is banned? This blogpost suggests I should not buy it, any other opinions? Thanks. Hellemans
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellemans0
