To Redirect or Not
-
I have a strange situation and looking for advice on how well a permanent redirect of url will work.
I have an eCommerce site called twpstain.com. This site sells TWP Deck stain and the URL/Content is fully owned by me. We do not however own the TWP brand and have always operated with permission from the manufacturer as an Authorized dealer. Circumstance have come up where they now want to be in control of all URLS that have the name "TWP" in them. Not sure if they legally can do this but they can cut me off with product if I do not comply. My options are:
1. A permanent redirect of entire site to new URL that does not have the word "TWP" in the url.
2. Give them the URL but they are willing to have me use the URL as I have in the past. A contract for this would be drawn up to cover me for years to come and possibly offer compensation if they decide not to renew.
My concerns are numerous but the question for the Moz community is to how well the 301 redirect will work and will I lose my rankings? I currently dominate the rankings for my site and I very concerned that there will be major loss of sales and traffic.
Any help or opinions on this would be much appreciated.
-
That would be my concern, if they control the DNS, that would scare me as well.
I still think your best bet would be playing by their rules while spending your time building up a new website.
I would also recommend getting legal advice. I remember long ago I came across Nissan's website which now is functional, but for a while it was just a landing page that stated neither Nissan Computers nor Nissan Motors was allowed to use the website.
If you did a 301 redirect, and this company went hard enough and ended up demanding you to pull the domain, I would hate to see you loose all the 301 potential anyway, simply because they pulled the rug out from under you.
Good luck!!! If I were them I would try and just buy you out!
-
Several years ago when I first started in SEO, I bought domains that were relatively close to my competition's domains, it was a competitive tactic that is quite out dated. However, I never suffered any legal ramifications. My sites were not always live, they were just bought to prevent my competition from buying them.
That being said, I do not believe that they are trying to take the domain away from you for any other reason than it is their brand name and they want control of it, or they want it to disappear. You do not have to give them control of the site, I wouldn't personally. I would hate to have someone running my site, no thank you.
Having a brand is becoming extremely important for SEO. You are probably ranking so well because your domain includes an established brand. I would buy a domain that reflects the name of your business, your brand, and redirect the twpstains.com to that domain. You will see the most benefit from this approach. You will be able to maintain most of your SEO juice and be able to recover faster than if they take control of the domain and decide to do something else with it, like redirect it to their site, or redirect their site to twpstains.com. It wouldn't be in their best interest to have both sites running at the same time.
-
1. Redirect and content would be the exact same as I own the content and data.2. They want the URL but they want to make a contract with me and have the DNS point back to my site. Issue is they can play hardball and switch the DNS if they want or void the contract on conclusion.
Thanks for help!
-
I already do but this one ranks the best. Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks. They do not sell direct.
-
Wow,
Now this is quite a quagmire. TWP owns TWP-Stain.com and obviously is upset that you rank higher than they do for their own product, even though you sell their product. I probably would have thought you were the company if I didn't snoop around and hadn't met you on Moz.
Unfortunately because your domain name does include their brand, and is an identifying factor of the company to the public I believe they could technically take legal action. If the domain was "woodstains.com" it would be different because that's a generic term. (I AM NOT A LAWYER I JUST HAVE GONE THROUGH SOMETHING SIMILAR).
Regardless, in my opinion you are in a situation where they could potentially take over if they wanted to regardless of your wants and needs.
My Thoughts:
- 301 redirects do work, they will cause a drop in ranking, the more similar the content the better, but they will hurt.
- Another option would be to start a new website selling your goods and just negotiate a price to let them use that domain? That's what I do currently. I was in a situation where I ended up stepping out of a company, but I owned the domain. I still own it, but the DNS records point to their server, that way they are still in control of everything.
- Create another website, give them control of them domain, play by their rules, and link this current website to your new website. Take the stipend from them, let them worry about this website and profit. (Ryan typed it faster than me)
Hope this helps a little!
-
The contractual option sounds like it would be the best in this situation, especially since the site is solely dedicated to one brand.
Even with the contract in place you could still develop a separate site that carries multiple brands and begins to rank in other areas. That way you'd have some insurance if the contractual route eventually ends and not have to redirect form scratch.
-
If you have to change your domain name then you will most likely suffer rankings loss. You will redirect the old domain to the new domain, which will temporarily help, but you will basically have to work on the new URLs to get them to rank.
What they are asking for seems strange. Do they sell direct as well?
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
-
New Alternate View Redirection
Hi, We are merging two sites, differentiated by the type of customer (consumer or corporate). Currently we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoeuroflorist
www.consumersite.com/product/
www.corporatesite.com/product/ When on the new site, the type of customer can be switched by clicking 'Corporate' or 'Customer' which adds ?user=Business or ?user=Private to the url which then redirects so the URL is the same but certain features have changed. We block ?user=Business and ?user=Private in URLs in robots.txt to prevent duplicating pages. Should we redirect like: www.corporatesite.com/product/ -> www.consumersite.com/product/ Or: www.corporatesite.com/product/ -> www.consumersite.com/product?user=Business (this will then redirect but the parameter is blocked by robots.) I'm concerned redirecting to a URL that is blocked from indexing is an obvious error. Any ideas are welcome. Thanks!0 -
Flip-Flopping domains - 301 redirect question
We have a client who has had the following domain setup for some time: longdomain.com 301 -> shortdomain.com Now, they would like to go back to the original longdomain.com, and will have the following setup: shortdomain.com 301 -> longdomain.com Obviously, I'm concerned about redirect loops cached in the browser. I plan to have the 301's from longdomain.com changed over to 302's for two weeks ahead of the change, so that hopefully when the change happens, browsers and search engines are more ready to respond. I also plan to establish rel=canonical on the longdomain.com pages after the switch. Is there anything else you'd recommend to help with the changeover? Should we plan for an intermediary period were both domains are serving the content, so that the redirects can be purged, before being re-established the other direction? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bit-Wizards0 -
Redirect wordpress.com and internal link ?
Hi Moz Fans, First of all, I need to say thanks to all of answer to previous post. And today i also have the another question that similar to that post. Because our website using Wordpress.org as our CMS for blog post then easier to redirect by point to new site, According to setting site URL ? However in our each blog articles also have anchor text as internal link that link to another blog post, Which mean those link will be automatic redirect to new URL. So once Google bot re-crawl our website when we tell the Google by webmaster tools and the redirection we using 301. What will be happen when Google Bot crawl those link again We need to changes those link as well Keep same with redirection. Nothing happen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
303 redirect
Hi, 303 redirect is a good thing or not ? I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/. A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/. Thanks D.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
301 redirects
Hello, I want to ditch about 1000 pages of a 2000+ page site. I believe the 301 redirect thing is the way to go but my expertise is limited. Is there a way to do a blanket redirect ie if a user or search engine looks for a page thats not there it all gets redirected to the index page or do I have to do each one manually? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
After the 301 redirect
Hi all, A quick question, after you have setup your 301 re-directs in .htaccess - is it necessary to keep your content in the original domains directory? My thinking is that requests do get as far as referencing the directory, thus it should be safe to delete all the files on the old domain? Thanx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazza7770 -
Redirecting multiple websites to a single website
I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand. My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time? I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain. Thanks! Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daenterpri0