Changing the domain - To do or not to do - that is the question
-
Hello,
I am in the process of updating my website (hopefully to improve SEO). It is a major update as we are going from 20,000 product line to 200,000 product lines and hiring two marketing people to work on more content. Unfortunately, I think my domain isn't the best
i.e.
Some of the parts have long part numbers and I am worried that my URLs will be too long i.e. I will lose link juice from the search engines.
typical url
www.direct-tractorparts.com/6XY41210TTTAZCAz2
I am thinking of launching the new site with a shorter domain name rather than updating the old site. My site doesn't have that many backlinks but generates a decent level of business for my company. Not sure if it would be worth setting up another brand or not
Anyone got any advice?
-
I think having a dash is no longer a negative thing. Matt Cutts has made many open public statements about using dashes in the URL. We currently have a domain in an extremely competitive keyword "keyword1--keyword2.com". it's performing extremely well after about three months. It's also a brand new domain. If you do end up going with the newer domain, make sure you use a permanent redirect (301) from your aged domain to your new one. This will pass most, if not all, of your link juice to your new domain. Google also tends to give new domains a quick boost in SERPs. This usually doesn't last too long, but could be a welcome surprise if your website of high quality. Cheers! Dmac
-
thanks for all the pointer.
I know the dash was a bad idea. We kind of fell into ecommerce by accident and it has been a case of trial and error.
My domain authority is 26/100 - so a lot of work to be done.
-
I would agree with Phil, I think the URL is pretty good. Ensure you categorise your site so your URLs don't end up massive and you'll be fine.
Your URL isn't actually that long.
DD
-
yeah I agree with searchpl, dashes in domain names should be one of the last resorts of making a domain name
-
There are a couple ways to go about this.
- It would be better if the new domain doesn't have a dash (-) in the name. Dashes are considered best practice after the .com. For example: www.brandname.com/dashes-go-here-instead
Then you could just 301 redirect the old domain to the new one so you get credit for most of the links you had on there.
- The deeper you get down in the site your URLS are going to get longer anyway. Example www.mystore.com/company/product/long-part-number
Changing your URL just to save characters isn't worth it. You would only wind up getting rid of a short amount of characters anyway (unless you plan on buying www.ab.com).
So only change the URL if it would be better for your brand in the long run.
-
www.direct-tractorparts.com/abc
If abc is a tractor part that will be searched for then your url seems pretty good to me. Your site is not available so I can only guess but you might want to look at categorising the site. eg where abc is a tractor engine part:
www.direct-tractorparts.com/engines/abc
I would not be concerned with urls this length but maybe someone else more expreieced might have a different opinion.
Phil
-
If the actual site have decent keywords in the url and is old enough, you should keep it.
Switch to another domain if the domain name is extremely good.
What domain authority do you have on the actual domain ?
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
-
International Websites - Hosting, Domain Names, & Configuration
What is the best way to configure a website that targets a number of countries and languages around the world? For example, Apple has websites optimized for just about every country and language in the world (see: https://www.apple.com/choose-country-region/). When you choose the UK it takes you to: https://www.apple.com/uk/ When you choose China it take you to: https://www.apple.com/cn/ Etc. When you go to apple.co.uk it forwards you to the UK version of the website. The same is true for apple.cn. Is this the ideal way to set it up? I have also seen websites that have each version of the website on its own TLD such as exampleBrand.co.uk and exampleBrand.cn - in this example they don't forward to the .com. My concern with Apple's solution is SEO and hosting. Do consumers favor seeing their country's TLD in search results over exampleBrand.com/uk? For hosting, shouldn't the mainland China version of the website be hosted in China? Is it possible to just host a folder of a website in a certain country such as the cn folder for China? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I was unable to find much info on this.
Web Design | | rx3000 -
Analytics year to year comparisons when Url extensions change?
We manage a website which we recently changed from Drupal to Word Press. In the change, we dropped a small part of the previous URLs - the end extension - .php For example /attractions-rates.php is now
Web Design | | Teamzig
/attractions-rates with no .php. We eliminated the .php to make the URL simpler. How is it possible (and easiest) to do a year to year comparison as Google sees the pages as different? They didn't for the first 8 days (we could see both) but now the pages with the .php extension shows zeros. The content of the page is exactly the same only the .php is different. We know we can manually go back to last year's reports and do side by side but that is time consuming. Hoping there is a filter or process we can use to gen a report? Thanks, Jim0 -
To Genesis or not to Genesis that is the question
Hi everyone, i know this subject has been raised few times in the past, but i wanted to reach out to the community and find out what is your take on the advantages and disadvantage (if any) for using the Genesis Framework when building a new websites for Clients. I know for fact that many developers are complaining that they find it harder to manage the Genesis Framework, which i do appreciate has a bit more of comparability issues when it comes to plugins and modifications, but i always looked at it as a positive rather then a negative. My personal opinion is that Genesis framework is more of a stable Skeleton that is better read by Search Engine (from a technical SEO point view) and is harder for hackers to penetrate. Would have love to hear the community experts opinion pros and cons. Cheers. Dan
Web Design | | artdivision0 -
301 Redirect from Old Domain to New Domain
I am building a new website and I plan to 301 Redirect my Old Domain (olddomain.com) to a brand new Domain (newdomain.com) in the upcoming months. To do this I was planning to update the htaccess file on both the old and new domains. The htaccess file on the old domain would look to 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the new domain. The htaccess file on the new domain would detail any specific URL redirects I want to implement (ie. olddomain.com/EXAMPLE/TEST will redirect to newdomain/TEST) - this will ensure link equity is retained and bounce rates are kept at a lower level. Does this sound like the right approach? Also, what do I need to do with the old domain going forward? Do I need to keep this forever in order for the 301 redirect to work or can I eventually just forward the domain to the new one permanently?
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Keywords in url - specific case question
There are a bunch of questions about keywords in the url and so far what I've gathered is that it's good to have them but keep it simple so it doesn't look stuffed. I'm working on redesigning some sites that were originally setup by a group who had no understanding of SEO (or perhaps I should say a misunderstanding) and spent a lot of time stuffing keywords EVERYWHERE. In some cases they weren't too far off but in others I think they just went overboard. One of the areas I'm trying to fix are the paths which leads to the following concerns. One of the sites has a basketball section and through the use of the Adwords keyword tool they determined that most people are searching for "basketball hoops". My first question is, how reliable are the monthly search numbers in the Adwords keyword tool? Are they accurate enough to warrant forming keyword strategies based on the results? As it relates to the url issue, the current tree for the basketball section of the site looks like this: /basketball (the landing page for the whole section, there are other sport specific pages as well) /basketball/hoops (goes nowhere. not sure why they didn't just go to /basketball-hoops/x for other pages) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards (the systems are split into three different backboard sizes, these pages group them onto one overview page per size) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards/specific-basketball-goal (the actual basketball goal details page with options to buy and such) So what I'm wondering about this setup is: does having /basketball/hoops take care of having the "basketball hoops" search term or would it be more effective to switch to /basketball-hoops? If it's fine to leave it at /basketball/hoops, do you think it would be beneficial to create an actual page for that path? We found that actually more people search for "basketball basket" than "basketball hoops" so maybe that would be a good page to try to make use of that term and explain maybe why people think "basket" instead of "hoop" and why we call ours "goals" or something. I tend to navigate pages by deleting path arguments and I hate when I land on a nonexistent path so I'm leaning toward changing the paths but just don't know if it's worth it at this point. Additionally, on one of the other sites, we have a domain that is the main keyword we want to rank for: swingsets.com The other company I mentioned then decided to put all of the product pages under: swingsets.com/swing-sets/{category}/{set-height}-{'swing-set'|'playset'|'swingsets'|'play-set'|etc...}/combo{#} So that comes out to look something like this: swingsets.com/swing-sets/outback/5ft-playsets/combo2 I've never liked that path setup. It looks stuffed to me, especially once they start using '5ft-swing-sets' and '6ft-play-set' on other product pages. It's inconsistent which is another issue I have since I tend to surf by path. Another issue with that setup is the final argument of combo{#} but there's nothing I can really do about that because they call the products out as combinations. The only actual product name is the "outback" part. I've been trying to come up with a better path setup for a long time now but again I'm concerned that I may just be wasting my time. The only thing I did do was make the height section consistently {height}-playsets. Is that good enough or should these paths remove /swing-sets from the beginning? The actual /swing-sets page is a good and valuable landing page but then I'm not sure if it remains valuable to keep it in the paths for the product pages afterward. Any insight into this dilemma would be appreciated. I've been stewing over this for a long time and my reasoning always becomes circular since I can see plenty of reasons for keeping them the way they are and simplifying them.
Web Design | | EscaladeSports0 -
What is the best way to point newly built website on new domain name to the original more well known domain?
Live website on abc.com domain is being totally redone and moved to a new platform. to facilitate full testing and compliance, the new look and content was built on a different url - xyz.com for example. Now that all content is approved and testing, we want people visiting the abc.com domain to see the xyz.com website without necessarily redirecting abc.com to xyz.com What is the best to do this? Thanks all
Web Design | | wkismb0 -
TOP 5 Questions I Should Ask a web designer or developer?
I want to redesign my website to work better with SEO and crawls. I need to make sure I hire a good designer/developer but I don't have a ton of money to spend. What are the top 5 questions I should ask a web designer/developer to ensure they are good designers and have successfully implemented SEO??...or at least a site that is crawled well and has some SEO built in.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
This is not a question but a comment
My website www.kids-iq-tests.com is mainly focused on articles; however, I have noticed that after adding a few images of celebrities, I have gained a lot of traffic from image searches from Google. My point is that by adding images of popular celebrities to an article, you can gain a substantial amount of traffic. give it a try and see if you can gain traffic from image searches.
Web Design | | dougster620