Change domain.com to www.domain.com - influence on linkbuilding, seo, etc.
-
Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.
-
Hi there,
It's a delusion that 30x redirects can lead to PageRank loss. This has now been confirmed multiple times by Gary Illyes and John Mueller. As long as you properly implement a 301 redirect, there shouldn't be any issues.
-
Reyzer, there really is no risk when you move from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com on the same domain. If you were to move from one domain name to another, that would be different--and you'd want to use Google's Change of Address tool to tell them that you're moving from one domain name to another.
But, when you move from one subdomain to another subdomain (which you are doing in your case), there is NO loss as long as you properly implement 301 Permanent Redirects on the pages. Google has been very public about this, and as long as you move using a 301 redirect and it's on the same domain name, there is NO loss whatsoever.
The same goes for moving from http:// to https:// as well, as it's the same domain name.
-
Hello there!
Yes, there will be risk.
Making that change is technically a redirect from non-www to www domain.
I'd advise you to read this article about new redirection rules and PR loss, it states that usually there is a 15% of PR loss and that theoretically nowadays there will be no loss.Also, if you decide to do it, remember these 4 things:
- Add and correctly configure in Search Console the preferred version.
- If you can, try to change the links already created. Set the new domain as the link.
- Of course, from that time and on, all the links should have the www.
Hope I've helped.
GR. -
Typically this doesn't really matter - links built to a domain will always benefit that particular domain, regardless of whether it can be accessed at 'www.', 'non-www.', 'http://' or 'https://'. I would bet my bottom dollar that there will be almost zero impact on your positions.
Remember to couple this change with a change in Google Search Console to set your 'Preferred Domain' appearance in Google Search results - this can be done under 'Settings' > 'Site Settings'.
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
-
Purchasing an existing domain + redirecting to company's domain
Let's pretend that competitor.com ranks well for certain search terms and generates some traffic from organic search. If a company were to acquire the competitor (or their domain), what's the smartest way to redirect that SEO value to the acquiring company's website? Does a 301 redirect work between different root domains? Even if it does work, is that the smartest approach? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raleigh0 -
Domain.com/postname vs. Domain.com/blog/postname
I am wondering what is the best practice regarding blogs? I read that it would be best to structure a website like a pyramide instead of a flat panckage But I have seen many blogs where the post shows right after the domain name. Domain.com/postname instead of Domains/blog/postname My point is that if a website has many post then the structure will get very flat and this will maybe make your most optimized and important pages less important to google domain.com/page a) What do you think about this, which one of the two blog solutions do you prefer and why? b) in context to blog If for instance you had a keyword like Copenhagen property would you then consider renaming your blog to realetateagent.com/Copenhagen-property-news/post-name c) Would write a little intro like 200 words for the page 1 of your blog and add in some keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local. My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted. I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Domain forward to landing page - good or bad for SEO?
Hi Mozzers, Just recently we acquired a domain (www.nhacaribbean.com) for marketing purposes. Our technical staff used a frame forward to redirect the domain to the landing page http://www.nha.nl/alles-over-nha/Caribbean.aspx, which is only linked in the sitemap (not in the navigational structure of the site). Now, I'd personally just redirect the domain with a 301. But our CEO really wanted to keep the domain www.nhacaribbean.com visible in the URL bar. My question is: could this (potentially) really hurt rankings for our web site one way or the other? I'd love to hear from you guys. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NHA_DistanceLearning0 -
PhoneSale.com - technical SEO analysis
We own and operate a site called: http://www.phonesale.com/ For the past 5-6 months, we have been working to recover our organic traffic which was hit heavily May 2012. We have made many strides in terms of eliminating technical issues w/ the site as well as cleaning up our link profile to no avail. Is there anything else that we can do to help get back into Google's good graces, both on page and off page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Domain Issue
Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust. I have a few questions.... -Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy? Any guidelines on how to value domains? If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info? Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
Large Site SEO - Dev Issue Forcing URL Change - 301, 302, Block, What To Do?
Hola, Thanks in advance for reading and trying to help me out. A client of mine recently created a large scale company directory (500k+ pages) in Drupal v6 while the "marketing" type pages of their site was still in manual hard-coded HTML. They redesigned their "marketing" pages, but used Drual v7. They're now experiencing server conflicts with both instances of Drupal not allowing them to communicate/be on the same server. Eventually the directory will be upgraded to Drupal v7, but could take weeks to months the client does not want to wait for the re-launch. The client wants to push the new marketing site live, but also does not want to ruin the overall SEO value of the directory and have a few options, but I'm looking to help guide them down the path of least resistance: Option 1: Move the company directory onto a subdomain and the "marketing site" on the www. subdomain. Client gets to push their redesign live, but large scale 301s to the directory cause major issues in terms of shaking up the structure of the site causing ripple effects into getting pulled out of the index for days to weeks. Rankings and traffic drop, subdomain authority gets lost and the company directory health looks bad for weeks to months. However, 301 maintains partial SEO value and some long tail traffic still exists. Once the directory gets moved to Drupal v7, the directory will then cancel the 301 to the subdomain and revert back to original www. subdomain URLs Option 2: Block the company directory from search engines with robots.txt and meta instructions, essentially cutting off the floodgates from the established marketing pages. No major scaling 301 ripple effect, directory takes a few weeks to filter out of the index, traffic is completely lost, however once drupal v7 gets upgraded and the directory is then re-opened, directory will then slowly gain back SEO value to get close to old rankings, traffic, etc. Option 3: 302 redirect? Lose all accumulate SEO value temporarily... hmm Option 4: Something else? As you can see, this is not an ideal situation. However, a decision has to be made and I'm looking to chose the lesser of evils. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again -Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bacon0 -
How to seo : two domain having exactly the same content
Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server. Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more. I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ... All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ? here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion?? Again thanks a lot for your help 😃
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT0