Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
-
Good day guys,
We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain.
However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website).
It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties.
Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change?
Thank you.
-
This YouMoz post may also help some too. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
-
I would recommend following the step by step guidance of Google in the Webmaster Tools -> Configuration -> Change of Address:
-
Set up your content on your new domain.
-
Redirect content from your old site using 301 redirects.
They offer further guidelines here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
-
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
-
Domain authority a better metric then referring domain count?
Hi Guys, When reviewing competitors what would be a better metric - Referring domain count OR domain authority. From my understanding DA is a indication of the quality of the link profile. So if a site has a high DA this is a better metric for comparison then referring domain count. What are your thoughts on this? Cheers/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
How best to handle partial domain move?
The scenario is this, we have a website eg: ABC.com where the content is in two language folders (en-us and en-gb). We have created a new brand with website XYZ.com for the USA market. Of course, this domain will take a while to rank because it is completely fresh. My question is how best to deactivate the en-us content on the old site to: a) prevent it showing up on Google US
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esseljay
and
b) pass the US traffic to the new website to boost its rankings I was thinking of removing the en-us pages from ABC.com and using a 410 error page containing a link to XYZ.com
Would it be better to replace the content on en-us instead (with a link)? I'm not keen to use a straight 301 redirect as sometimes we get traffic from other countries to the en-us content. Thanks in advance Mozzers 🙂0 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects on the same domain name
Hi, I'd appreciate some advice ont he below. I have a website, say www.site.co.uk that has just been redesigned using a new CMS. Previously it had URLs in the format /article.php?id=123, the new site has more friendly urls in the format /articles/article-slug. I have been able to import the old articles into my CMS using the same article IDs and I have created a unique slug for each post. So now in my database, I have the article id (from the querystring) and a slug. However, I have hundreds of old URLs indexed by Google in the format /article.php?id=123 and need to redirect these. My plan was to do the following. 301 Redirect /article.php?id=123 to an intermediate page, in this case /redirect/123. On this intermediate page I would do a database lookup for the article slug, based on the ID from the querystring, create a new URL and perform a second 301 redirect to my new URL E.g. /articles/article-slug-from-database. Whilst this works and keeps the site usable for visitors the two 301 redirects do worry me, as I don;t want Google indexing lots of /redirect/[article id] urls. The other solution is to generate hundreds of htaccess redirect rules that map old url to the new url. The first solution is much cleaner, but the two 301's worry me. Will Google work this out on it's own, is there a better way? Any advice is much appreciated. Cheers Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCrompton1 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cordstrap0 -
Website change of address
Hi Everyone, I apologize if the answer to this questions is obvious, but I wanted some input on how changing our web address of our site will affect our SERP. We are looking to change our website address from a.com to b.com due to rebranding of our company (primarly to expand our product line as our current url and company name are restricting). I understand that this can be done using 301 direct and via webmaster tools with google. My question is how does this work exactly? Will our old website address show in SERP rankings, and when a user clicks on the listing are they redirected to our new address? With regards to building new links from press releases etc, do we have links point to our new web address or the old one in order to increase SERP? Does google see our old address and new address as the same website and therefor it does not matter where inbound links point to and both will increase our ranking positions? It took 6 years of in house seo to get our website to rank on the first page of all the major search engines for our keywords, so we am being very cautious before we do anything. Thanks everyone for your input, it is greatly appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AgentMonkey0
