Legal Client Wants to Change Domain Name... What's the best way to pass authority from old domain?
-
Hey Mozzers,
I received a call on Friday from a 6 attorney law office who have been my client for a long time. They have an established brand/domain in their market which isn't very big, but has a lot of competition.2 of the attorneys are leaving to start their own firm and they want to remove a letter from their name abbreviation, thus their domain name as well. So, the other partners want to change the domain to reflect this.
They want to buy a EMD [city]lawyers.com for about $1,600 along with some others to protect their new brand and name.
I have a good idea as to what I need to do, BUT would love to hear advice from the community for this type of drastic change. 301 redirects? New Google Analytics code or same just different profile? Webmasters verifications? Content from old site? Old domain forwarding or keep active for a little bit? Is not the time to get them an SSL?
Also, what should I prepare them for in terms of website traffic expectations and Google authority drops or remains the same? I know their Moz DA/PA will drop to 1/1, but anything else to look out for?
Thank you in advance!
Fellow Pro Member - Patrick -
Thank you, Patrick! I'll check all of these out and share all aspects with the clients so they know what potentially lies ahead in terms of rebranding and using a new, different domain name.
Really appreciate the article references too. - Patrick McCoy
-
Hi there
I gave an answer to a similar question recently in another Q+A thread with a bunch of resources. It's linked to in the answer, but Moz has a great migration guide that can help you properly prepare and migrate a website - you can read that resource here.
Let me know if this helps you - good luck!
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
-
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Same language, Different countries. What would be the best way to introduce it?
Hello, We have a .com magento store with the US geo targeting We're going to launch a different versions soon, one for the US, and another one for Canada (we're going to add a Spanish and French versions later as well) The stores content will be same, except currency and contact us page. What would be a better strategy to introduce it to Google? What is better URL structure? example.com/ca/ , example.com/en-ca/ , or ca.example.com/ ? Should we stay with the original www.example.com/ (example.com) and just close an access to /ca/ and /us/ / or use rel=canonical / or use "alternate" hreflang to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Meditinc.com0 -
Targeting different countries with domain name
Hi currently have a eCommerce store .com.au targeting Australia. We want to start targeting the US market with the same products. I guess what would be the top choice in this case since our domain is location-specific to Australia and not a generic top-level domain (gTLD)? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Rebranding/Changing the name of an established domain in order to target a bigger market?
So let's say I have a site called "ToyotaParts.com" that has good SEO metrics and is ranking highly for keywords like "toyota tires", "toyota battery", etc.... What if I decide that I wanna target other cars as well with my site and keywords like "mazda tires", yet still want to take advantage of my domain's existing authority... Can I do something like get a new domain like "carparts.com" and redirect the old domain to it and then continue to create new pages that would target new keywords, or would I risk losing my current domain's authority or running into other seo issues? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjonson0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Pinging SE's - is this spam?
Hi, Just read on ViperChill that Matt Cutts told Glen (owner of ViperChill) that ping services can help your blog posts. Now lets say you have a list of 10 that you ping and you put an article up everyday, thats 300 pings a month, is that not spammy? Here is the link to the post: http://www.viperchill.com/future-of-blogging/ If you scroll down your see a screen print of Google search box, its the para above and below this screen print.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper1