Consolidating 3 regional domains
-
We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us.
This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain.
The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains. We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based.
So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach.
One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules.
Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually?
Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible?
In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3?
Is this a good strategy?
What's the best 301 approach?
Any other advice?
Thanks
J
-
I agree with Daniel. Page-to-page 301 Redirects are the best way to ensure each page's ranking value is passed along and then maintained with the least amount of loss.
-
Redirecting each and every page using a 301 redirect to the most relevant new page is the best way to do it in my opinion. It's a time consuming process but it is worth doing this rather than a whole domain redirect.
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
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 -
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Redirect ot new domain
Hello, Can someone give me advice on this specific situation: For now we have a website www.website.com/ Because of some specific business situation we want to move to .ca version but also we want to keep website.com - for U.S customers. Here's how I imagined to do this: 301 Redirect from www.website.com to website.ca. Because at this time website.com redirects to www.website.com I would remove the redirect and just keep it like website.com (so this will be new domain). Is this is the right solution? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
Consolidating two separate domains and redirecting towards a new replatformed domain
A client has two different sites selling the same products with the same content, they would like to replatform onto Magento while redirecting those 2 sites to the new URL. The question is, besides monitoring the 301 redirects is there anything else to take into consideration when consolidating two sites into one new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RocketWeb0 -
Root Domain v Subdomain
Hi, Just doing some analysis on a domain, and the (external) linking root domains show as:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
21 to Root Domain
4 to Subdomain The site is hosted under the www. subdomain version and there is no 301 from domain to www.domain Should the site be: Hosted on the root domain instead of subdomain 301 all incoming requests on domain to point to www.domain (subdomain) Any comments and experience on this type of situation appreciated!0 -
Purchase of domain name from a different industry.
Hi I am thinking of acquiring a domain name, although it is currently being used in a completely different industry to the one I hoping to use it for. The site only has 46 links and was registered in 2009. It has a DA of 25, Home PA of 37 and PR of 2 I was just wondering how easy or hard it would be to optimise the website for a completely different industry, i.e. lets say it was initially bought to sell hair-care products and I want to use it to sell electronics. Would I leave the existing links in? Could I use that new disavow tool in webmaster tools to wipe the slate clean and start again? Really haven't come across this before, does anyone have any ideas? Thanks for your time, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
Buying domains with prior age and or PR
Is there any value to buying a domain for its PR or age? Or is it no better than a brand new unregistered domain name? On the flip side, is there any potential danger of buying domains with PR and age?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peigenesis1