We are moving one website to a different domain and would like to know what is the best way to do it without hurting SEO
-
The website we want to move, let's say www.olddomain.com has a low quality back links profile, in fact it received a manual notification from google of unnatural links detected; but the home page has a PR 3. We want to move it to a different domain let's say www.newdomain.com. We would like to know if it's better to do a 301 redirect to the new domain, in order to transfer the link juice or if it would be better to do a 302, taking into account that this redirect won't pass any link juice, so it would be like start from scratch with this new domain.
Thanks for your help.
-
Thanks for your help guys. What we are probably going to do is build the new site and start doing good SEO, and since we don't want to pass the link juice from the old site, I think we will just do a 302 redirect so that we don't loose any customers. Thanks again
-
This is more of a business decision, but you want to dive into that manual notification to get to why you received it. Assuming you were running the link building for olddomain.com, you should know which links are problem ones. If not, then you need to go through an audit of the links so you know which ones are problem ones (and can have that for future reference.)
You also want to factor in how much brand building you have done with the current domain. Do you have print collateral, print ads, business cards and a current customer base that knows that domain? Do you get direct type-in traffic for the domain? How are those customers going to react when they see the newdomain URL when typing in the old domain?
My personal site got a manual penalty b/c I built a bunch of low quality links trying to beat wikipedia for a term. That killed the main domain for that site for a little while until I cleaned up the link profile. Now my personal site has the penalty removed and is back in the SERPs. It's not quite to where it was pre-penalty, but I've also done zero link building outreach for that domain since the penalty was lifted. I'm confident that if I were to implement a solid content strategy for that domain this year that I would get back to where I was pre-penalty. It's just a matter of content and effort.
If you have a notification, now's the time to clean up some bad links and disavow the ones you can't remove. That shows Google that you're taking action and can stave off a penalty being applied.
-
I really hate it depends type answers, but you have some choices to make, and only you can answer the question about starting over.
First how easy was it to get the links required to get the PR 3 result? Do you already own the domains that brought that type of page rank. Or do you have a friend that you may contact to quickly build the links back? How about negative baggage the old domain brings with it. Does the old domain have links that that are non desirable that you may want to separate yourself from? Is the new website a completely different idea than the old website? If the new domain and old don't share a similar idea, the spiders may look at the old domain redirect as a negative for the new domain. An example might be if you had a chat room about camping products, and the new domain is related to Indy race cars, your not doing yourself any favors doing a 301 redirect.
-
IMO this is more of a business decision than an SEO one (especially without looking at the backlinks and the Google notification). Depending on the business, I'd probably just leave the old site up (and keep capturing leads through there) until it is actually penalized, and work on doing things the right way on the new site.
But only you know the extent of the dirt that was done on the old site, and that should probably be the determining factor. Don't get caught up in the PR stuff though, It wouldn't factor into my decision.
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
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Most important things for seo a travel website
Hello everyone a website working on travel field with this address : https://goo.gl/4gaoAn Let me know what do you think about it and please give me some advises about it get improve on google rankings. If you be able to take time and give me some advises based on what you see on the website, would be great for me. Also what would work best for me to have a great link building strategy after penguin 4.0 update? and what does my site lack right now? Thanks and waiting to hear from you asap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BahadorGh0 -
Do industry specific domains help SEO?
Hi everyone, I've looked for an answer to this but I can't find one. Hopefully someone can help! I have a new client that is a builder. They currently have a .co.uk domain (e.g. businessname.co.uk) Would it help them if the website was businessname_.builders_ instead? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebsiteAbility0 -
SEO for a redirected domain name
Our client is a law firm with a name that is challenging to spell. We have procured a domain name for them that is catchy, easy to spell, and plays well into their brand, or at least the current campaign. We're using the campaign domain to direct traffic to their website with a 301 redirect. We have placed the campaign domain in a variety of offline mediums including print and outdoor. The client is currently in the number 1 spot for a good number of our highest priority keywords, so I do not want to do anything to jeopardize that. I'm also not sure this campaign will be their "brand" long-term so I don't want to risk making a switch and making it back. So for now, I'm most comfortable leaving the campaign domain as a redirect to their primary domain. Recently, the client approached me complaining (legitimately) that when people google the campaign domain, they are brought to search results for an entirely different domain because Google "corrects" the domain name for them. This is obviously a bad thing, with many users defaulting to entering urls into Google instead of the address bar. If you tell Google that it was wrong about the autocorrection, our site is in the number 1 position. I liken the situation to Overstock.com using O.co as their offline domain, but overstock.com as their online domain. But imagine if you googled o.co and google brought you to a list of results for "on.co" because it assumed you fat-fingered it. Is there anything I can do to prevent the domain name from getting corrected by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steverobinson0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Best way to get pages indexed fast?
Any suggestion on best ways to get new sites pages indexed? Was thinking getting high pr inbound links on fiverr but always a little risky right? Thanks for your opinions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mweidner27820 -
Using exact keyword domains for local SEO
The website is for the attorney that serves several nearby cities. The main page is optimized for the biggest central city. I have several options how to go after the smaller surrounding cities: 1. Create optimized pages inside the main domain 2. Get more or less exact keyword domains for each city e.g. for the city ABC get yourABClawyer.com and then a) use 1 page websites that use the same template as main website and link all the menu items to the main website b)use 1 page website with a link "for more information go to our main website" c) point exact keyword domains to the optimized pages within the main domain. Which option would be the best in terms of SEO and user experience? Would people freak out if they click on the menu item and go to a different domain website even though it uses the same template (option 2a) Would I get more bounces with option 2b in your opinion? Would option 2c have any positive SEO effect? Should I not even bother with exact keyword domain and go with option 1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SirMax1 -
What is the best way to run a blog?
Hi, I was wondering what is the best way to run a blog? The options I thought of are: Completely separate domain with many links to my main site. blog.domain.com www.domain.com/blog Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1