Should I migrate clients site to older established domain?
-
I have a new client who had a domain that was established in 2004. About six months ago they moved their site over to a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new one. Their pagerank on the new domain is 1, and I can not find any historical data on the older domain. Would it be beneficial to move the site back to the old domain assuming that it had a higher pagerank? And is there a way to find out what the pagerank of the old site was before the redirect?
-
Oh... argh. Yeah, that makes step one easy. In some cases meta refresh acts like a 301 (if it's set to 0 seconds), and in others it doesn't, and there isn't a lot of rhyme or reason. Get the page-by-page redirects running, and you may see a pretty quick positive impact.
-
I initially that is what I was told by the webmaster. After running my own analysis it appears that they had a meta refresh.
-
I'm slightly confused - I thought you said the 301-redirects already were page level.
-
Thanks for all the help guys. I think I am going to use the new website and on the old domain use page level 301 redirects. Although the old page had a higher pr rank the new page is branded with the companies name. I am hoping with the redirects in place that the new site will catch up with the old ones PR eventually. Thoughts?
-
send Dr. Pete the information that I gave you in the PDFs after running it through all this it different tools showing what links go to which domains and I bet he will have a handle on it in no time.
All the best guys,
Tom
-
Ignoring toolbar PageRank (which can be very unreliable), have rankings and/or traffic fallen? What does DA/PA look like in our numbers? It's entirely possible the domain change was just a coincidence, but without historical data to compare to, it can be very tough to tell.
-
1. Yes I have verified as such.
2. It is redirected on a page by page basis.
3. The new page is the same as the old page with some additions here and there over the past three months.
4. I haven't seen any signs of bad links.
-
Did you happen to get my private message? I believe you are new site is going to blossom. However the tool you and I have both been looking for is been here the entire time.
http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank
Please have a chance to read my reply in private message I hope it will be of help to you. Sincerely,
Thomas
-
I apologize the confusion was most likely on my side.
So the company had a domain that they were not happy with for around 9 years?
they purchased a brand-new domain from a registrar?
they move their site 6 months ago to this new domain because they preferred the name over the previous domain.
I agree nothing shady at all please excuse my last comments. Have to stop replying using a cell phone.
are you comfortable sharing that domain name? Either in a private message or in this form?
I would use tools like majesticSEO to determine the link profile of the older domain. then compared directly to the new domain if there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of relevant links I would say you are losing quite a bit.
Did you or did they to any 301 redirecting all? The reason I ask is that never hurts to ask this.
there is a plethora of tools out there that might be able to figure out what your previous page rank was however unless you had a lot of negative links or some sort of penalty going on with your older domain I would imagine it being much higher than a page rank 1.
If you did not do the 301 redirects as they are supposed to have been done and Dr. Pete has done great job of listing what needs to be answered.
"Fast forward to present day where I have taken over the account."
Did you take over this account less than 6 months ago or just recently?
if that's the case you may not really know what happened I'm assuming that makes this a lot more difficult considering if you are not there how would you know?
Do you know who did make the changes if you did not?
if so can you contact this person?
have you tried looking at your compared to your new domains traffic using compete or Alexa?
just to give you an idea of what's going on I would base it on majesticSEO's capability of showing you the history of your old domains back link profile. Obviously if there are quite a few more relevant domains pointing to your older domain comparison to your new domain that is going to make a big difference.
I would also of course look at the traffic using the tools I've mentioned above. I would also contact owner and asked them for a neat Google analytics data that you can get your hands on.
Sorry for my confusion earlier. I hope this will help you. And I would love to know the answers to these questions as well. If you would be kind enough to either paste the domain here or private message me at I would be more than happy to look those things up myself.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
So, just to be sure: Six months ago, they 301-redirect the old domain to the new domain, correct? A couple of questions:
(1) Have you verified that this is a single-hop 301-redirect using 3rd-party header checkers? In other words, make sure it's working the way they think it's working. I don't say that to be condescending, but because I've seen it screwed up many, many times.
(2) Did they redirect on a page-by-page basis, or did everything just go to the new home-page? Are there potentially pages that got left out?
(3) Is the new page topically relevant to the old page (sounds like they're the same company)?
(4) Is there any sign of bad links on the old domain? Sometimes, links that didn't impact a domain after a long time can cause problems after a redirect.
-
Maybe I did not explain it correctly. My client has a company that has been around since 2004 with the same domain name. The simply bought a NEW domain(not existing from an auction) because they wanted to change their domain name. They moved their site 6 months ago to the brand new domain and pointed their old site to the new domain. Nothing shady happened here just a company wanting to change their domain name.
Fast forward to present day where I have taken over the account. There pr is 1on the new domain. As far as I know I can not determine what their page rank was on the old domain, but I assuming that it was probably higher than 1 because they have been using it for over 9 years and were getting about 10000 hits a month. I am wondering if it would be beneficial to move their site back to the old domain assuming it HAD a higher pr.
-
The domain that was purchased afterwards is going to rank just as your site is equal to whatever Google thinks it is equal to. They're not going to give you credit they know where the Site was that its been re Whois & reindex google knows exactly what's happened they know that who is has changed. And they probably even know that it's been doing auction. So if builder domain had links that were relevant to your site you might benefit from those. However if not you will not benefit from them they will hurt you. In the end unless you bought a domain because you needed it and it was a branding issue Google will most likely started back at zero it won't Happen right away but it Will not benefit you to buy a domain just because it is older and then reindex it and change this who is an think Google is going to give you credit. Those days are sadly over but at least you can get the domain you want I hope that's why you bought it why did you buy if you don't mind me asking?
Wow okay first off start off by looking at the new domain the older new domain and tell me the link profile using the http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ here if you see any shady links that would We're not on the prior domain that would be a good indication that you've purchased a domain that is not any good. I personally think that purchasing hi PR Domains and trying to move them is coming to a end. However it can be done but it's on the very shady side of things and I would advise against it. On how would you know that it has never been penalized?
What was the prior page rank of the website before you moved it to the older domain that it is on now?
More importantly what was the Moz trust rank?
It seems that this is a fairly new website. And page rank of one or two should be expected for a short while. Google's not Just going to give you credit because you purchased a domain and then put 100% new content on it they know what happened. The only way I can see it working is if you actually purchased a hi rank real website keep Everything the same even the whois in the other person's name even then I would advise strongly against doing that.
Today you have to earn your way to the top of Google
please tell me about the frist Domains rank page rank and Moz rank did it suffer when it moved? I would advise against moving domains back-and-forth extremely strongly in less it has a very high page rank which would probably be diminished because of what's occurred. don't know how old this is a call if you give me some of that information I can give you some more advice.
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
-
What are the SEO considerations when migrating a whole site from http to https
Hi Mozzers, I'm in the process of migrating a whole site, which has excellent rankings built through ongoing SEO over the years, from http to https. What is the safest way of doing this, while maintaining rankings? I'm assuming 301 redirect of every page from http to https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | A_Q1 -
Migrating micro site into existing website
My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain. The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it. The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category). As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc. What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | ViviCa10 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Parked Domains
I have a client who has a somewhat odd situation for their domains. They've been really inconsistent with how they've used them over the years, which makes for a slightly sticky situation. The client has two domains: compname.com and fullcompanyname.com. Right now, their website is just HTML (no CMS) and all of the URLs are relative, so both domains work. Since the new website will be in WordPress, they need to commit to one domain as the primary. Right now, it looks like compname.com is the one they've used the most in ads and such, so I'm going to recommend they go with that. However, the client has also used fullcompanyname.com a lot. They don't want to have to setup individual 301 redirects for everything. I think it's ridiculous, but you can lead a horse to water... Our developer has done some research and he may have found a solution that will satisfy the client. I just want to find out if there are any SEO implications. The possible plan is to us compname.com as the primary domain and to park fullcompanyname.com. That way, if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects. Since the domain is parked, Google won't recognize it as duplicate content, correct? Just to be clear on the whole situation, I'm insisting that all of the website URLs need 301 redirects, regardless of the domain. The primary concern is with a lot of other stuff on the server that isn't related to the site (email campaign landing pages, image files, assets that are pulled in by the client's software, etc.). The client's concern is about redirecting all that other stuff (and there is a lot of it--thousands of files). The parked domain would seem to fix that, but I want to make sure that the client won't get Google slapped.
Technical SEO | | BopDesign0 -
Switching site from http to https. Should I do entire site?
Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning. So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https? Even simple information pages and blog posts? Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft1 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Should this site start again on a new domain
Hi We have not done SEO on this site they have used another company who looks like they outsourced and the links have been built by a third party all blog networks and this company have said they cannot get the links removed. Google flagged artificial links on this web site in February and in April it lost over 10000 visitors in a month and its just free falled ever since. The categories have been recreated and no redirects created due to the amount of backlinks from the blog sites to the original category pages but the site is not recovering its down to 1500 visitors a month and used to get 14000 a month. So should my customer ditch the domain and move this site to fresh domain? http://www.kids-beds-online.com Any answers would really be appreciated. thanks Tracy
Technical SEO | | dashesndots0 -
How much damage in search rank will my site suffer during an upcoming cms migration?
Hello, This is my first time on the seomoz forums and I hope I can get a real answer from this community of experts. I am migrating an existing site from an older cms (modx) to a newer cms (expression engine). The domain name isn't changing and neither will the keywords and keyphrases for existing pages. What is changing, however is the url suffix. This means I am going from www.domain.com/page-name.html to www.domain.com/page-name I can't seem to replicate the html sufffix in the new urls. Now this is the only reason why I will be setting up 301 permanent redirects from the old urls to the new ones. My question is: Will the domain suffer a loss in page rank or a substantial decline in search engine position as a result of this migration process? How fatal will it be? When can I expect my rankings to recover?
Technical SEO | | amit20760