Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
-
Is it possible to migrate to a new domain name without negatively impacting SEO?
Our existing domain name (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) is a bit spammy. It has been used for almost 10 years. We would like to migrate it to www.metro-manhattan.com. The metro-manhattan domain has been registered about 5 years and it redirects to the nyc-officespace-leader.com domain.
The nyc-officespace-leader.com has a domain authority of 23 and a page authority of 32. The metro-manhattan domain has a domain authority of 7 and a page authority of 23.
Is it possible to make this transition without losing domain authority and page rank? I would think that having two domains might loo spammy to Google and this change would be a positive in the long term. We do understand that the redirects for each page would need to be done carefully.
Thanks, Alan
-
Considering that traffic for this site is about 4,000 visitors per month and the domain authority is 23 and a page authority is only 32 would that make it easier and faster to recover traffic and ranking?
The site currently has about 400 pages, what if I prepare re-writes on about 100 pages of text before the domain change and then gradually add this content after the switch. Would that speed recovery?
I intend to re-write the content anyway but perhaps to do so after the new domain gets launched.
On the other hand I may keep the domain as is if this switching is too much trouble. However the URL does not match my company name and I am concerned this discordance could be harming the site long term.
-
Do a full 301 redirect and don't worry so much about DA/PA - they are not google metrics and the numbers themselves don't influence google rankings. But just as Monica said, you will see a drop in rankings but they should be back up in 2 weeks or so.
-
I guess it depends on what kind of links you want to build. You can buy thousands of links all at once but that will only hurt you in the long run. The rule I follow is to stay within 10-15% of your existing links. That is just a metric I use to help explain to clients what "natural" link building should really look like.
You will be passing some link juice to your new domain, but it isn't a fluid transfer, meaning you will not reach the DA of 23 simply by redirecting the old domain. You will get a higher domain authority by building reputable, quality links. I wouldn't do anymore than 20 a month, since there are only 100 links to the metro-manhattan.com domain.
-
Considering the existing domain authority is only 23 do you think that that building new links for the metro-manhattan domain could be accomplished without a huge effort?
There are less than 100 domains linking to the existing URL.
Thanks, Alan
-
DA is mainly influenced by link activity. I don't think that it would be any easier to build DA and PA on your metro-manhattan domain as it would any other domain. It will take time to build links effectively and organically. I also agree with EGOL. I believe you should look into metromanhattan.com instead of having a hyphenated domain.
-
Thanks for your response. I understand that DA and PA will not be transferred seamlessly. However the existing domain authority is 23 and a page authority is 32. Considering these numbers are relatively low, does it make it easier to recover them if I redirect the site to a new domain?
Note the existing domain has been around for several years and has a domain authority of 7 and a page authority of 23.
Thanks, Alan
-
That is a really good point. The - in a domain name is usually not a good thing.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying it isn't impossible to regain rankings over time. It just won't happen instantaneously. It is possible over time to actually grow more and be better than the old domain, but that will take work.
-
I changed domains a while ago and dropped badly in the rankings. The original domain was popular and getting a lot of type-in traffic and domain query traffic - many thousands of these per month. I believe that these were supporting it in the rankings.
When the new domain went up it was suddenly getting zero domain queries and type-in visitors. But over six or so months those strengthened and now it is back at the top of the SERPs, holding positions 1 and 2 with over 10,000 domain queries per month.
Just an opinion, I would not change my domain to metro-manhattan.com. I would go buy metromanhattan.com. If your domain has any popularity at all then a lot of people are typing in that domain name.
-
No, that is not realistic. You will implement 301 redirects which will help you keep some traffic and link juice, but your DA and PA will not be transferred seamlessly. You will have to build the DA and PA of your metro-manhattan.com site the organic way with quality links and great content.
The 301 redirects might cause a boost in DA, but it will not be equal to what you have now.
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
-
Not ranking
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes. we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy. any suggestions? any idea?1 -
Domain name change
Here's the scenario... Client has two domain names: domain.com - targeting one country (Australia) otherdomain.com - targeting all other countries Both have identical products, but different currencies (AU$ and US$). The problem (as most of you will know) is that without using a sub-domain or country-code top-level domains, Google has no idea which domain should be served for which domain. Furthermore, because the root domain is different, Google doesn't see any connection between the two - other than the fact they have identical products! My recommendation to the client is to change to: domain.com to domain.com.au otherdomain.com to domain.com Arguably, we could leave the second one alone. But I think it's better for the brand to use the same root domain for each. Obviously this means both will need to be redirected. Since NONE of the pages within the sites will change, do we need to redirect every page, or just the root domain? Any other risks or concerns we should know about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Is it possible to have organization markup schema for sub domain ? and how should it look like ?
Can we have organization markup schema for subdomain ? For example if my main domain is xyz.com and subdomain is sub.xyz.com If i plan to have organization markup schema for subdomain how should it look like ? Should the markup schema must have main domain url or sub domain url in markup schema ? Should it be like this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
How much does "Sud-domain SEO optimisation" improves website ranking?
Let's say there is a website(domain) and couple of sub-domains (around 6). If we optimise all sub-domains with "keyword" we want our website to rank for.....like giving "keyword" across all page titles of sub-domains and possible places which looks natural as brand mentions. Will this scenario helps website to rank better for same "keyword"? How can these sub-domains do really influence website in rankings? Like if the sub-domains have broken links, will this affect website SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Silly Question still - Because I am paying high to google adwords is it possible google can't rank me high in organic?
Hello All, My ecommerce site gone in penalty more than 3 years before and within 3 months I got message from google penalty removed. Since then till date my organic ranking is very worst. In this 3 years I improved my site onpage very great. If I compare my site with all other competitors who are ranking in top 10 then my onpage that includes all schema, reviews, sitemap, header tags, meta's etc, social media, site structure, most imp speed, google page speed insight score, pingdom, w3c errors, alexa rank, global rank, UI, offers, design, content, code to text raito, engagement rate, page views, time on site etc all my sites always good compare to competitors. They also have few backlinks I do have few backlinks only. I am doing very high google adwords and my conversion rate is very very good. But do you think because I am paying since last 3 year high to google because of that google have some setting or strategy that those who perform well in adwords so not to bring up in organic? Is it possible I can talk with google on this? If yes then what will be the medium of conversation? Pls give some valuable inputs I am performing very much in paid so user end site is very very well. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pragnesh96390 -
3 Pages Ranking Beside Each Other | How do I consolidate so one ranks better?
An ecommerce website I own called backyardGamez.com sells outdoor games, for example cornhole boards, bags, etc. One such product is a cornhole board carrying case. If you search the above phrase, my site has three pages that rank on the first page. The term isn't high volume, so I'm assuming that is part of the reason. Is this a good, normal thing or does this mean I have inadvertently broken up my ranking power from one powerful page to 3 OK pages? Does anyone know how I can take two of these pages and use them to make the 3rd page more powerful? For example, I would prefer 1 page ranks higher on page 1 in the serps and the other two fall a bit from supporting the other. Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Soft-Lite0 -
Domain change - slow & easy, or rip off the bandaid?
We are laying the foundation for a domain change. I'm gathering all of the requirements listed from Google (301's, sign up the new domain with WMT, etc), customer communications, email system changes, social updates, etc. But through everything I've read, I'm not quite clear on one thing. We have the option of keeping our current domain and the new domain running off the same eCommerce database at the same time. This means that we have the option of running two exact duplicates simultaneously. The thought is that we would slowly, quietly turn on the new domain, start the link building and link domain changing processes, and generally give the new domain time to make sure it's not going to croak for some reason. Then, after a week or so, flip on a full 301 rewrite for the old domain. There are no concerns regarding order databases, as both domains would be running off of the same system. The only concern I have in the user experience is making sure I have internal links all set to relative, so visitors to the new domain aren't flipped over and freaked out by an absolute URL. I'm not confident that this co-existing strategy is the best approach, though. I'm wondering if it would be better from an SEO (and customer) perspective to Have the new domain active and performing a 302 redirect from the new domain to the corresponding page on the old domain When we're ready to flip the switch, implement the 301 redirect from old to new (removing the 302, of course) at switch time. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goedekers0 -
New domain name for existing site
Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham0