Rebranding and Domain Name Changes
-
Hi All,
One of my clients wants to rebrand http://indiaretailnews.com/ so that it's clear that the site is under the operational umbrella of http://tradebriefs.com/. indiaretailnews.com has a lower domain authority of 20, but because of the domain name it ranks number #2 for the keyword "retail news" for Google India.
The client's question:
Can we change the site names to TradeBriefsRetail.com orTradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com without affecting the SEO on each site? How do we do this – redirect from TradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com to IndiaRetailNews.com and so on or simply put all the content on the new sites and get rid of the old domains or some other way? Do long domain names cause a problem?
Another option is TradeBriefsRetail.in, etc with the domain extension showing the country that the content is for.. In a year or two, we will be expanding to markets outside India.
My opinion:
Keep the old domains and redirect to something like http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news
Or perhaps a subdomain:
http://indiaretailnews.tradebriefs.com
In the short term, I'd imagine rankings will drop, but if we wanted to consolidate domain authority, I was thinking that http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news would be the best bet.
Thoughts?
Kenji
-
Thanks for the resource. Much appreciated!
-
Yes, it is. I thought you were going to redirect the whole site to a single sub dir.
If you want a really good tutorial, this Best Practice on SEOmoz is really thorough.
I am pretty sure when I looked you were on a LAMP stack with the sites so should not present any probs.
Best -
Thanks Robert! This helps.
If we were going to go the URL to URL route, would there be any reason not to redirect to a subdirectory?
For example: http://indiaretailnews.com/index.php/best-practices/industry
Would be 301'd to
http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news/best-practices/industry
Wouldn't this be a good way to consolidate?
-
In the total and in the beginning, you will affect the SEO with the change, but the question becomes how much.
Another consideration is brand equity and whether you would lose any. If, the only reason for changing is to show that one is under the umbrella of the other, I am not sure of that as a good strategy. Why not just put something on the site that makes that clear?If however, you are having dupe content issues, want to consolidate staff, want to try and boost one site, etc. then you can 301 A to B. With the tradebriefs having higher authority, I would do as you suggest doing and go to it. So, indiaretail 301's each url to the appropriate url on tradebriefs. Not 301 indiaretail.com to trade briefs.com.
The last two with subdomain and sub directory is not the way to go IMO. The subdomain is its own domain and does not share linking, etc. With the way you are showing a single sub directory, that would kill a ton on your site and you would waste a lot of your linking.
The 301 url to url is the way to go.
Hope that helps,
Robert
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
-
Does changing/shortening a url hurt SEO?
Hi all, I am in the process of making small optimization changes to my site. I noticed Moz identified quite a few URLs that could be shortened. I intend to shorten these URLs and create 301 redirects to ensure website users land on the right page. My question is, will this change in URL damage rankings and engagement(assuming the URL remains content relevant)? I have read in some places that when creating URL redirects for a change in domain, people saw a dip in rankings and engagement. I, however, am not intending to change the main domain of the site, but rather the URL slug. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | annegretwidmer0 -
What should my site name be?
Hello, I'm a physical therapy clinic in Fort Myers, FL. Currently my website is named "Physical Therapy Fort Myers". My company name is Back In Motion Sport & Spine Physical Therapy. My question is, should I rename my site under my business name or is it OK to keep it as "physical therapy fort myers"?
On-Page Optimization | | backinmotion1230 -
Need to change permalink structure - need advice on these two options
I have a client with a robust Wordpress blog that ranks well for a number of high-volume terms. We are doing a site rebuild, and they are adamant they don't want to lose any SERP ranking. However, their permalink structure contains the date the post was published, i.e. https://www.company.com/blog/2018/10/28/blog-post-title The date inclusion is not ideal for obvious reasons, but also because it's creating 404 links when pre-scheduling with Hubspot. Option 1: Change the permalink structure for all posts, past and future, and implement 301 redirects The only reason I'm not outright doing this is because there will be some slippage in the rankings, given that redirects only pass on a percentage of juice. The client doesn't want any slippage. Option 2: Create a new instance of Wordpress in a new subdirectory and continue the blog from there This will mandate a new structure for the blog posts; now posts will be children of /industry-blog/ instead of /blog/, but the old posts will remain as they are under /blog/ (and with dates intact). But I don't know if this will cause some hierarchical confusion that will negatively impact both the old blog and the new blog. Any advice given is appreciated. Please feel free to correct me if I've gotten anything wrong, I've only been practicing SEO for a few years now.
On-Page Optimization | | Marce5210 -
Duplicate Blog pages across different domains
Hey Moz Community, I have 3 Duplicate websites which more or less contain the same blog article ( they are copy & paste from the original website ). I am now in the process of changing my duplicate websites and I stumbled upon this problem: if I have to change the content for all the duplicate articles I have across my different domains it would be a very time consuming task and on the other hand I don't want to no index, follow the duplicate articles because I want to use them for SEO purposes. Should I only change the articles that brought significant traffic and no index, follow the rest ? What do you think ? Thanks, Anddrei
On-Page Optimization | | kiraftw0 -
SEO for multilingual and multiregional site seperated with subdirectories on same domain
Hi all, I am working on a website that is multilingual and multiregional.
On-Page Optimization | | helgeolaussen
The site is on a single TDL where the countries are seperated with subdirectories.
I am only working with SEO for one country, so just one of the subdirectories.
Do you guys have any tips on important stuff to remember when doing SEO for this site?
Any pros or cons for this? Ty0 -
Multiple keywords over multiple domains - am I missing the point?
This I think, is a conceptual question related to Moz/ KeywordTracking in general. Q: What is a "good" way to setup tracking for keywords across many pages, potentially multiple domains? At present I've identified some keywords that are relevant to our products. That leads me to want to track not just for a specific page, but for their rankings across multiple pages, and potentially at least two domains. One site is our main product site, the other a blog/info site. This is I suppose mostly discovery at this point. Working out what, if any, of our pages are ranking for a full set of keywords that we believe are related to our products. It may be that I'm completely missing the point of tracking, that I'm not using it as intended. I want to learn how our pages track currently (for a bunch of keywords), see that change over time as we make changes, and also visualise what we're strong in and what we're not. To me, this would let me see just where the holes are in our SEO easily. The reason I ask is that it seems I have to manually enter a keyword plus a webpage in Moz. Given I've 20-30 keywords I want to track many pages, this is going to take me "quite some time" (tm). Is there a better way to do what I describe here? Am I missing the point of keyword tracking?
On-Page Optimization | | shinywhitebox0 -
Google showing my content on the serps in a different domain
Hi all, Recently a partner of ours discovered that Google is showing a meta description on the serps for his homepage that is not his but ours. On his site, he sells add-ons for our software, so the name of our software appears many times and as well there are many links pointing to our site. He claims he hasn´t copied this text from us, and I have used some tools to verify this. I don´t understand how Google can get confused and show our text as the meta desctiption on the serps for his homepage. Any idea on why this happened?
On-Page Optimization | | Paessler0 -
The crawl diagnosis indicated that my domain www.mydomain.com is duplicate with www.mydomain.com/index.php. How can I correct this issue?
How can I fix this issue when crawl diagnosis indicated that my www.mydomain.com is duplicate with www.mydomain.com/index.php? That suppose to be the same page and not duplicate, right?
On-Page Optimization | | jsevilla0