Buying a used domain - redirecting, pluses etc?
-
Hi,
I have a 6 year old domain which has been the basis for my main business website operation. http://www.kent-website-designer.co.uk/
Im in the process of cleaning up some messy sitewide footer kinks that come to the notice of Penguin update. I think I can clear up a lot of links but obviously need to add some better links for the future to improve.
Ive gone from #1 to #60. I was thinking of a rebrand as the EMD isnt doing much good anymore in benefits plus the drop in rankings and also Google definately favouring brand links over concentrated anchor texts. So maybe the time is ideal. The design needs a refresh anyway....
I have found a 1999 .co.uk domain which has some non keyword related 1999 links to it...nice. Its a very reasonable price. Its not going to have inbounds from my related markets, not ideal but it has no negative stuff either. Also its a very simple but rememberable name like Google or Yahoo. Great for branding.
Its parked but Waybackmachine shows indexing back to `99 and google cache has some content on it. However OSE shows low domain / page authority.
Im thinking of redirecting my current domain to the new one, passing some of the positives of age and titles...and replicating the site through 301`s.
Is this worth doing in anyones opinion? Only thing with my domain isany branding words are anchor text words too. I cant win.
-
Hey, that's fine, I'm just saying that if your old site was being penalized for bad links and you just 301 redirect it to a new site, the new site will likely also get penalized. If you can clean up the link profile, great. Note that 301s do not pass all the link juice, so you will be losing a little bit of link value by redirecting. As for the new domain, like I said, it's not going to have any value just because it was originally registered back in 1999. But if you just want it to branding, that should be fine.
-
Takeshi,
My theory is;
clean up links, improve link profile
use the old unused domain that suits my new branding direction for that reason only
use 301 to redirect content from old domain. plus it will pass some good
Theres nothing bad about that practice I believe.
I use the domain of choice because in registering a new name, both offer zero links but name suits.
note the domain has not been dropped....
Registered on: xxx 2005 Expiry date: xxx 2015 Last updated: xxx-2012
-
If you simply redirect your old domain to the new one, you will simply be transferring all the bad links from one domain to another. If you are starting fresh with a new domain, you shouldn't be using 301 redirects.
An aged domain can sometimes retain some authority, but if it's been parked for a while, probably not. If the domain does not have any active links coming into it, then just the fact that it's old does not mean it's going to rank well. Best to just pick a brand new domain that's a better fit for your brand.
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
-
YouTube transcript being used for junk blog?
Should I be concerned about youtube transcripts with our brand name being used to populate junk blogs? I just noticed this with freshweb this morning: http://www.sharehomevalue.com/blogs/11567. There are about 4 pages of results like this... mostly Korean websites.
Branding | | SSRMarketing0 -
The pros and cons of subdomain or new domain for a new brand?
Hi there Moz experts, We're launching a new brand and product offering for a completely different audience than we've worked with before. We're expected a significant amount of business to come from inbound marketing, so we're wondering whether we should launch the new brand as a subdomain of the parent company or as a completely separate domain. The parent company's website has thousands of inbound links and is over 10 years old, so I'm thinking in the short term it would be easier to get new content ranked there. However, in the long term I think it would be better for the new brand to have a separate TLD. Thoughts or other things I should consider? Thanks!
Branding | | EveryActionHQ0 -
I have a company with multiple locations through out the US and I am trying to figure out the best way to use Google+ and Facebook.
Should I create separate pages for each location or should I create one account and add all my locations to that account?
Branding | | steve2150 -
ECommerce Sites: Sub domain vs. Unique Domains
Hello everyone! I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search). Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain. Is this best practice? I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But... What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc. We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly. Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)? Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain. Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward. On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth. That's another problem for another day...
Branding | | brad.s.knutson0 -
Moving Blog from www.topic.domain.com to www.domain.com/blog
Hi Fellow Mozzers, Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog. I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this). Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made. So, I guess my questions are: (1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com (2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building). (3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA. Thank you!! Pedram
Branding | | CSawatzky0 -
Organic fluctuations after domain migration ?
I'm working on the rebranding of an ecommerce site We're going to do a domain migration and since half of the current traffic is coming from organic searches I'd like to estimate possible fluctuations on this channel. **Do you have any rebranding experience? or can suggest good case studies on this? ** (Technically speaking we know the protocol and also on the communication/strategy side we're covered.. we just need an estimate of the organic drop.. in the worst case scenario)
Branding | | homeonline0 -
Branding/Domain Challenge
A year and a half ago, SEO was all new to me and I may have made a mistake that looks to be a problem now. In a misguided quest to rank higher and faster, I used a domain for it's keywords and quick ranking potential rather than using my business' name URL. I've built the links and authority to where I'm now ranking well for many of my local search terms which is important for my local business success. The situation is that now I want to expand my business nationally as a franchise which will require my company's name in the domain(?), and the addition of entirely new pages and terms. My company's name' URL> www.ImpactMMAfitness.com is pointed to my site www.austinfitnessgyms.com and GA shows a significant # of visitors type our name in to find us. I also think it would be odd for someone outside my town looking for franchise info to be pointed to a different domain with Austin in it. I was wondering what option would be best: Keep as is Change domains - ouch!? Make a new second site ? I have 'ImpactFranchise.com I could use for a new site just for franchising but I would be starting at the bottom for any rankings. Is there a solution, or did I dig myself into a hole?
Branding | | OhYeahSteve0