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.
Changing domain for a magento store
-
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please...
We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results.
While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain.
My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that?
Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too?
As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site.
Thanks,
Carl
-
Good tip, thanks.
-
If there is any chanse that both sites will be live & crawlable at the same time, remember to put canonicals in the headers of the old site pages, so Google knows it is duplicated data.
Bruce
-
The 'new' site is the old site moved over so the plan is to 301 and just change the domain name so domain.com/1 would redirect newdomain.com/1 etc
Hopefully that should cover all bases
-
Hi Carl
No problem. Quick tip, try and make the 301s match as close as possible from the old page content to the new page content. If it is not quite 100% it will still pass the reduced juice to the new page, but if it is way off then any juice will be lost.
Bruce
-
Thanks, Bruce.
I'll begin work on my large redirect file.
-
You can have as many 301s as required, no problem at all. Google will not mind at all.
You will lose some authority of between 1 to 10% via the redirected to...pages, but this is to be expected. DA reflects the site and PA the page, so if you need to change the domain, then you will drop a bit, but will with good SEO bring this back up reasonable quickly.
WMT only specifies which version of the site you prefer, so Google knows that www.example.com and example.com are the same site. if you don't make a specification Google will not make the association and will class both as separate domains.
Bruce
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
-
Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
Hi guys, We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/living So, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash. However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule. Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers,0 -
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 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran20780 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldsze0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
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 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1