Thoughts on my change of address delima?
-
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains.
- internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website)
- companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website)
We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that.
My main concerns...
- From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case?
- As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we?
- Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts?
This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
-
This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch. That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do:
- GWT change of address
- 301 Redirection
- New links at time of redirection pointing to new site.
All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.
-
Can we put a percentage on 301 link dilution? We can't stay on the current domain so the question becomes what is the recovery time of newdomain.com (with Webmaster Tool site transfer) vs us.internationalcompany.com?
P.S. Thank you both for the continued responses.
-
Hi Tyler. Here's another case study that might give you some ideas about what you decide: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. From that example, you can see all the factors they took into consideration before combining the two. If it's great enough, you might convince the Corporate Website that it could be worth it.
As for the DA of a subdomain, that's not quite right. While the DA of internationalcompany.com won't be affected by the creation of us.internationalcompany.com, us.internationalcompany.com will start out as a new site. With the 301 redirection from your old domain to the new, it should pick up strength quickly, but it won't mirror the DA of the parent company's root domain. You can check this with PA comparisons of many sites that are hosted on subdomains as companies like wordpress and tumblr offer. Whatever you decide it looks like you'll need solid by in from corporate if you're working off of their servers so that you can address things like the robots.txt file, adding GWT verification code, and so on.
As a technical note, you can point a subdomain at a unique IP address by using an A Name instead of a cname in DNS. This means that us.internationalcompany.com could point at your servers as long as they have a static IP. That would give you more flexibility in working with file transfers, code and the like.
-
- The company outsourced the website to a 3rd party development company. My team has been told by the corporate office that the dev company owns the code and servers that the website resides on and we're simply using what they were paid to develop for us. To get the access that we want we'd have to buy the code and from what I've gathered it won't come cheap.
- That sounds comforting. So in this scenario a strong emphasis on establishing proper 301's and maintaining page authority should leave us in a better position than when we started?
-
Re: 1- Tough call. Why can't someone have access to the main site?
Re: 2- Subdomains now have the same DA as the rest of the domain.
Re: 3- Great company to study,
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
-
Changing from .com to .com.au
Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creativeground0 -
Changing business name from keyword to brand name, what are the effects on SEO?
I think it's best to give you an example to illustrate what I'm asking here. Current Brand Name: Keyword Driven Brand Name (keyworddrivenbrandname.com) New brand Name: KDBN (kdbn.com) What will the effects of this change be. I'm slightly worried that we have lots of links with the anchor text "Keyword Driven Brand Name" and we rank very well for terms like "Keyword Driven" and "Brand Name". I guess what I'm asking is, do we need to go and change all those anchors to KDBN and will this upset our search rankings. Or do we leave the existing anchors? But will Google see this as over-optimised anchor text and penalise our website? Decisions decisions! Also, should we leave the old brand name in our title tags, at least for the transitional period, i.e. KDBN | Targeted Keyword | Keyword Driven Brand Name Any help with this would be really appreciated, Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
There is no change of address pending for your site
Hi everyone. Google has recently started using our old .net instead of .com in the SERPS. I went to do a change of address for the old http://www.sqlsentry.net and it gives me the "There is no change of address pending for your site." I've tried for both www and non-www and still get the same result. All pages seem to be redirecting to the new site with no issues. Is there anything else I can do to change this? Or is there a step I'm missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
New Website. Changing TLD or not?
Hi, At my company we are making a new website because the days of the old one are numbered. We already decided that the folder structure will be changed so we have more "clean" url's. Now we also would like to change from .net/nl to .nl . Since we already are redirecting all url's (>10.000), we think this is the moment to switch the TLD. What do you guys think? Is their anyone who has some kind of experience/tip they would like to share?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Should I Roll Back Domain Change?
A couple years ago I changed domain names and switched platforms for my site. The traffic dropped dramatically (80-90%). I've tried to get inbound links changed, clean up on-page stuff, but nothing is making a big change. I think most of the problem is loss of link juice with the 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one. Would I be risking bigger losses by switching back to the old domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iJeep0 -
On Page Rankings dropped without any changes
What could have factored into some of my key words dropping from an A to a C on my on page rankings. I am not sure how it happened because there were not any chages made. Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Google WMT Change of address.
Hey all. I've got two domain names. -rt112media.com -route112media.com http://rt112media.com is my main address. The preferred domain. My Google WMT account has 4 sites listed that I am a verified owner on. 1.)rt112media.com 2.)www.rt112media.com 3.)route112media.com 4.)www.route112media.com I recent changed the address in WMT for route112media.com to have the preferred domain rt112media.com. I did this on Nov 23. It is currently saying their is a request and I can withdrawl. Now I'm needing to set the preferred for www.rt112media.com to be rt112media.com but it will not let me because of the pending route112media.com. The problem is I'm getting a ton of errors under my www.rt112media.com diagnostics. I'm not getting any under rt112media.com but I am thinking it is still effecting my page rank. I have the 301's for all set up as a 301 wildcard to rt112media.com. They all redirect to the preferred domain I wan (rt112media.com.) Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Route112Media0 -
Changing domain reigstrant - seo impact
Hi there if you get a domain off someone and change registrant details and hosting, to what extent does this affect the power of the site? Any opinions of interest, many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0