Old Domain - What to do?
-
A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements.
Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website.
I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages).
If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.
-
There are a lot of factors to consider what you want to do with it. Personally, I tend to stray away from microsites due to 1) it's a lot of work for a team to build out more than one site & keep it maintained and 2) as far as the linking aspect, Google is getting smarter to tell who owns what domains, who owns the same domains, and how they're linked.
-
I'd almost certainly first try to use it as a micro-site. Would it be big deal to do a quick overhaul (not sure what your business is)? If you can generate leads from it, why risk a fishy redirect? Either way, could always link from the new domain to your existing and pass some of that link love.
Agree with Brandon too that more info is needed but I can't think of much that would convince me to do otherwise without trying this first.
Good luck
-
Brandon -
Thank you. I'll take a look at the question that was asked previously. I guess I missed it in my search before I asked this one. Much appreciated.
-
There was a similar question asked a few days ago. Not sure it directly corresponds to your situation but it is worth a read: http://www.seomoz.org/q/purchased-new-site-with-good-serp-ranks-do-i-operate-and-build-links-or-redirect-the-tld
To summarize: there is no easy answer and it requires careful analysis of both websites.
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
-
Multisite domain
good morning I have a wordpress site I have activated the multisite, currently the site has a domain authority of 8, when I publish a post, it is indexed quite quickly, if I publish a post in a language other than the /es subdomain it takes 24 hours why? If the author domain is the same, why does the employee take longer to be indexed on Google? Thank you
Technical SEO | | alainscilly770 -
Old homepage in google on branded keyword
Hello there, I have a strange problem: if you search "probike" (romanian google.ro), i get an OLD homepage with https://www.probike.ro , and my new homepage is https://probike.ro, the real problem is that title/meta description are not available (see attachment). Redirect 301: Ok
Technical SEO | | Shanaki
Robots.txt: Ok
Sitemap: Ok Help, is annoying 🙂 With respect, Andrei I33gThc0 -
Move from 4 Domains to 1
Hey Moz Community We are running 4 domains at the moment. www.rapturecamps.com www.surfcamp.travel www.surfcampbali.com www.surfcampinportugal.com We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1. All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so. For us there are two possible options We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations. Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains. The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1. Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.
Technical SEO | | 5Gates0 -
I have a sub domain that has live content on it but the root domain redirects to another URL. I know this is not great but what are the implications?
I have a subdomain that is populated and has content. The root domain that the sub lives on redirects to an entirely different URL. I am trying to make a case as to why this isn't great besides the fact that it is just weird user experiences. What are the SEO implications etc. Would any equity that gets built up on the subdomain get passed along in the redirect? Or will there be indexation issues with Google? Cheers, Mark
Technical SEO | | mjsikorsky0 -
SEO for sub domains
I've recently started to work on a website that has been previously targeting sub domain pages on its site for its SEO and has some ok rankings. To better explain, let me give an example...A site is called domainname.com. And has subdomains that they are targeted for seo (i.e. pageone.domainname.com, pagetwo.domainname.com, pagethree.domianname.com). The site is going through a site re-development and can reorganise its pages to another URL. What would be best way to approach this situation for SEO? Ideally, I'm tempted to recommend that new targeted pages be created - domainname.com/pageone, domainname.com/pagetwo, domainname.com/pagethree, etc - and to perform a 301 redirect from the old pages. Does a subdomain page structure (e.g. pageone.domainname.com) have any negative effects on SEO? Also, is there a good way to track rankings? I find that a lot of rank checkers don't pick up subdomains. Any tips on the best approach to take here would be appreciated. Hope I've made sense!
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Link building to ROOT domain OR to WWW.?
Hello, Here I come with one more 'sensitive' question, hoping that you SEO gurus could give some input on. My title explains pretty much what I'm wondering about, but let me give you some short data. I have from .htaccess file set that all traffic goes to WWW.mydomain.com. I know that it is 'better' for search engines not to have duplicate destinations as that can give decreased page rank because of 'double content'. As for search engines http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com is totally different domains. Now wondering one thing: If I build a several thousands of backlinks at various sources, blogs, directories, web sites etc etc. - shall I link to domain ROOT or shall I include WWW prefix? When looking at Moz Keyword Analysis for my domains, I can see a block about 'Linking Root Domains' and 'Page Linking Root Domains'. But no 'www' variable (sub-domain) there. As I have already set canonical part so everything shows with WWW on my website - what logic shall I use when building backlinks? How will search engine translate the link juice in regards I wrote above? Thanks in advance, great forum!
Technical SEO | | SEOisSEO0 -
Domain "Forwarded"?
Hi SEOMoz! The company I work for has a website, www.accupos.com, but they also have an old domain which is not used anymore called http://accuposretail.com/ These two sites had duplicate content so I requested the OLD site (http://accuposretail.com/) be redirected to accupos.com to eliminate the dupe content. Unfortunately, I do not understand completely what happened but when they performed this forwarding the accuposretail.com URL is still in use. Now it just displays EXACTLY what accupos.com displays and not something similar. The tech team told me it is forwarded but I can't help but see the URL still in the search box on top. Is this unacceptable? The actual URL has to forward and change to the accupos.com URL in order to not be duplicate content, correct? I have limited experience in this. Please let me know if we are good to go, or if I need to tell them more action is required. Thanks! Derek M
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
Beating a keyword Domain
Has anyone here managed to beat a keyword/exact match domain to top spot? I am currently second and wondering if it is worth the time and effort to knock it off the top spot. How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st? Any help and advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0