Questions on switching domain name of my site
-
Hey guys,
I purchased a domain name on May 1st and have been running my site on it since then. At the time when I added the domain name to the shopping cart, I felt that it was the best domain name a human could possibly come up with.
But now, after two months, I am not so sure about it. And that means I am thinking of getting a new domain name and redirecting the old domain to the new one.
Give that the domain is only two months old, there is not much to lose. However, my domain name does have some valuable backlinks, and has built some credibility in the eyes of search engines. According to MOZ Open Site Explorer, its Domain Authority is 10 and Page Authority (homepage) is 20. It's not much, but I fear that if I switch the domain name, I will reset the clock and the new domain name will have to earn the rankings from scratch
That said, after searching this forum, I come across articles like this one from google and this 2012 article from MOZ that gave me some confidence.
The MOZ article is from 2102, and there have been several changes since then. Is there an updated version of that article, or another legit article on the internet that you can point me to?
As you can tell, I want to be more than sure that we don't take any hit during the migration process.
Also want to mention that the site is on WordPress -- in case that is relevant.
Thank you for your help.
-
Thank you John, Marcus:
The situation is exactly what MArcus described.
Seems like the process is going to be rather straightforward.
To answer this, "is this a brand change or just a URL change?" -- it's just a URL change for a news site and there is no official label or brand behind it.
I am familiar with the tools your mentioned, so I should be able to handle it. If anything comes up, I will update this thread.
-
anybody can help me ?
i have web site one old can not change anything with good ranking one new no ranking and work with wix
what should i do?
-
Hey
If you are simply changing domain and not actually moving or redesigning the site then this is a pretty simple process. There is much to learn from the Moz article linked above but this goes into detail beyond your requirements.
- We are not moving anything.
- Page names wont change
- All that will happen is that www.old.com becomes www.new.com
If that is the case I would suggest three main steps here
- Change the URL and implement a catch all 301 redirect to enforce that
- Add the new and old URL in Webmaster Tools (Search Console) and inform Google of the change of URL
- Conduct a link audit and request updates to links where possible
I would like to have a rank check as well so I can measure the success and you could be lazy and not worry too much at this point about the link audit or only change key links.
There is likely some nuance here and I would want to crawl the site using Screaming Frog or some such once you have actioned the change to ensure there are no hard coded URLs (widgets in WordPress can cause a few issues here). If you review screaming frog crawl data and look for all 301's you should be able to iron out any kinks that are not sorted by steps 1 and 2 above.
The only other implication is whether the actual name of the business changes - that is, is this a brand change or just a URL change? If the brand is changing then I would want to make sure you factor that into any external platforms and mentions (this is a bigger issue if you are a local business).
If you take the right steps and inform the search engines using redirections and the search consoles then you have little to worry about here.
Hope that helps
Marcus -
The 2012 article from Moz is still current. There are other more current dated articles but in short same outcome.
From what you are describing you are on the right track. Make sure you address the backlinks correctly. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
You sound like you are in safe territory by taking a considered approach. Well done.
Let me know if any more queries.
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
-
Domain Change
What is the average organic traffic loss one can expect after switching to a new domain? We went from .com to .org and are seeing 50% decline in organic traffic and 25% in Google news traffic. 301s were implemented from site.com/some-page to site.org/some-page and change site was completed in WMT. This traffic drop seems excessive...
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
How to redirect old domain to new domain.
We just recently signed up to Moz with hopes of fixing our Moz Ranking. We have an old domain - http://at-net.net and a new domain - https://www.expertip.net We have set up 301 (Permanent) redirects from all pages on the old site to the new, but aren't getting the ranking or aren't getting recognized from external links to the old sites. I've read the moz article on 'Link Juice' and followed those practices, but it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have advice on doing this? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | greg.lanier
Greg0 -
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
Migration to New Domain - 301 Redirect Questions
My client is migrating their site to a new domain. I just did a big redesign, including URL structure change, and 301s from old URLs to new URLs. Now they want a new name, so we're moving forward with a new domain name. However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new name. During that time, I'm going to be building links to the new domain name and 301 Redirecting that new one to the current domain name. Then, once we migrate the site to the new domain name, I'm then going to redirect the current domain name to the new domain name. So, my question(s) is/are: Is the above process the best way to use 301 redirects to to build links to the new domain while we transition everything? Should I (or can I) do 3 redirects from the oldest URLs, to the current URLs then to the new URLs? General question... I can't seem to find this anywhere online, but what is the best practice for what order URLs should be in in the htaccess file? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kenny-King0 -
Migrating to New site keywords question
We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products. In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF). I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches. For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page. Question: in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords? I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.
Technical SEO | | ssaltman0 -
TLD as part of word in domain name?
What is best practice regarding domain names? Assuming I would target the keyword "example" examp.le or example.com I guess the latter is preferable, what could be the issues with the first option? /Lars Eriksson
Technical SEO | | LarsEriksson0 -
Domain name with separated/non-separated keywords
I start a new webshop within a month about spices and coffee. I'm thinking about the domain name to take. I would like to get visitors from coffee and spice keyword searches. How much does it matter (in terms of SEO) if I use spiceandcoffee instead of spice-and-coffee? (The site will be hungarian and it sounds easy to remember without the hypen: fuszer-es-kave or fuszereskave.) Does Google weighing more separated keywords in domain, instead of non-separated?
Technical SEO | | joo0