Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
-
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
-
Agreed, the redirects/canonicals should be permanent (well, for as long as you want the authority to pass along).
You would see changes in serps within 2 weeks usually.
-
Some people believe that it is very important to maintain 301 redirects for a long time.
If you have mydomain.com redirecting to mynewdomain.com and remove the redirects, then any links from xyz.com that point to mydomain.com will not go to the proper destination. All of their clickthrough traffic will be lost. And, if you remove the 301 you are letting the flow of ranking value to chance. Will Google forget where those links are supposed to go five years from now. (they might not be archiving this stuff as well as you think) How about other search engines? Or new search engines.
I have redirected domains a few times and all of those domains still have their redirects in place. The cost of maintaining them is usually going to be very low compared to the possible losses.
All of my redirected domains will be in place when I go to my own funeral. And, in the "urgent" section of my business continuity plan, my heirs are instructed to protect those old domains and redirects as if they were caches of gold.
-
Hey Oleg,
again, thank you for answering to this. Just to make sure, this is more than 3 weeks now, in other words I'm good to cancel the old domain now or should I keep it as a referral?
-
I would guess similar to 301 redirects... about 2 weeks.
The faster you can get Google to recrawl the pages and index the new canonical URLs, the quicker the authority will transfer over.
-
Hi Oleg, thank you so much for your response. I have actually done all of the canonical too and removed hreflangs as I did it to alternate the switch from https as it wasn't recognizing but all done. The site still not going much I'm not sure if it's about the Fred they are talking about now or don't know, however, the question is how long should I keep the old domain been forwarding?
Thanks!
-
huh? hreflang shouldn't be part of the equation here.
If you can't setup redirects, see if you can put canonicals on old pages to the new site. That way you'll transfer ranking benefits to the new site.
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
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Gradual Increase in Domain Authority After Domain Migration But No Improvement in Organic Traffic Yet
We migrated our domain in early April and simultaneously added an SSL certificate. Everything was done by the books. All redirects implemented perfectly, very few errors. Google notified via Search Console. Despite all steps being done perfectly our domain authority dropped from 24 to 8. Organic traffic dropped from about 80 per day to about 10. Each month domain authority increases by 2 or 3. We are now back up to a DA of 16. But no improvement in organic traffic yet. At what point should organic traffic start to return? Hopefully the consistent improvement in DA is a good sign. I have been told that adding SSL and moving the domain at the same time was a very bad idea. We are starting link building next week. Hopefully that will help further. Any ideas as to when this situation will improve? Needless to say it has been awful for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
New page not being picked up
Hello, We have created a new page for truck rentals but for some reason it does not seem to be picked up. See this report: http://screencast.com/t/npYqeoa5gq The page is: https://www.globecar.com/en/montreal-truck-rentals but our main site is being pickedup instead vs the competition that has their truck page showing up. Can anyone help me understand? Thanks, Karim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar1 -
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 -
Time for a new domain post-Penguin?
Hi there, Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin. Client only has a limited 'recovery budget' Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality. Client was ranking #4 or #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales. Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales. The client, under our supervision has Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well) Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it. After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time). We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were). We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword. Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15609869897230 -
Multiple domains expiring that have 301 redirects to my primary domain. Am I in trouble?
I recently took on the SEO of a large website with http://example.com. My predecessor bought 40 plus domains for specific cities like Jacksonvilleexample.com, Miamiexample.com, etc. ZERO of the additional domains linked to our main website. The domains that were bought basically had our exact same website in terms of content, links etc that mirrored our main http://example.com. I added 301 redirects to help problems that may be a result of this type of structure. Some of the additional domains were indexed and some were not but all have 301's and as far as traffic is concerned I'm not worried about loosing short term traffic. My question: All the domains are set to expire in June and I don't want to continue to have them 301 redirected to my main domain (example.com). I'm not trying to avoid the additional cost of all the domains but I don't see an advantage to having them so CAN letting all these domains expire hurt me from a long term SEO position if I don't renew them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ballanrk0