Should I change my domain?
-
.
-
.
-
I would say do what sounds the right choice from branding and business perspective. Search engines are pretty good and picking up domain migrations and there are tools to help you do that effectively (301, Google Webmaster Tools). To me .com does sound better.
-
I am with Aaron on this one but you have to remember that changing your domain name is something that you shouldn't take lightly. If you know a lot of people that link to you already it is worth the trouble of contacting them directly and getting them to link to the new domain name.
I think option two is easier to remember and will give you a better long term seo benefit, but don't jump in with your eyes closed!
-
Good points! If you were still wanting to keep the original domain and were worried about the type-in traffic you could also buy the non hyphenated domain and 301 it for type in traffic.
-
While 301 redirects do pass the "juice" it is never certain that you will get 100% to go through, however it sounds like long-term the new URL will help increase the overall SEO value of the site. I think it's more descriptive and I would make the switch, but I'm a little separated, obviously.
-
I'm no pro on domain names, but personally I think what you've got is ok. If you've built links to it and it's ranking well then I personally wouldn't change it.
Keywords in domain names are losing their importance. Matt Cutts recently posted a video about this:
-
I really like .com domains compared to .net domains.
I also don't like hyphens in a domain. They are very hard to communicate and hard to remember. Lots of people will type your domain and forget the hyphen - so lost traffic.
I think that SuretyBondSoftware is easier for me to remember.
If you know that your market is software for the long term then I would probably move to the new domain. However, if I had a lot of SEO in place on the old domain I would be a bit nervous about moving and suffering a some loss in the SERPs.
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
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
Drupal Domain Access SEO Issues
I'm working with a new developer to redesign several Drupal sites and have 3-4 sites with similar designs and modules. The developer is keen on using Drupal Domain Access to make maintenance and sharing user information easier. Each site currently has a unique domain and content (although the sites are in related niches). Are there issues from an SEO perspective with the Drupal Domain Access Module? With only one instance of Drupal on the backend will Google somehow not view these as independent sites? Thanks for any info!
Web Design | | talltrees0 -
We use bigcommerce platform and want to access the bigcommerce server to change the way our product images display
Hi We use bigcommerce and want to chage the way we display multiple images for our products. At the moment in bigcommerce you switch between images by clicking the next image, we want the images to change when we hover the curser over the image. Does anyone know how to do this ? Regards Adrienne
Web Design | | CostumeD0 -
How to export Wordpress comments ONLY to a new domain
Hi Guys, We have a bit of situation here. We have a website (let's say it is www.oldsite.com) where we had more than 2000 posts. There arose a need whereby we had to move some 60-70 posts from this oldsite.com to another domain of ours (www.newsite.com). So, here is what we did: Move those 60-70 posts manually from oldsite.com to newsite.com Did a 301 redirect of each of those 60-70 posts from oldsite.com to newsite.com. Google has now started to rank the posts from the newsite.com for this. That's all good till now. Now, here comes the situation. We also want to move the comments from some of those posts of oldsite.com (some 10-12 posts out of those 60-70) to the respective posts of newsite.com. How do we do that? Do note that we are pretty comfortable with databases and to some extent PHP. Please help.
Web Design | | seocuppa0 -
Internal links, new pages & Domain Authority
I have two questions regarding Domain Authority: 1. Is it possible that a drop in Domain Authority may have been caused by adding a blog and blog posts? In other words, would adding pages/posts dilute the site's authority? And will it catch back up with itself or will that require inbound links to those new pages? (oops! that was 3 questions in one) 2. Would it be detrimental to have internal links coming from blog posts without authority to my Home page and could that have contributed to a drop in Domain Authority? Thanks!
Web Design | | gfiedel0 -
Changing a domain for local.
I have a client that currently is using a sub-domain site from our local news paper site. The domain authority looks huge, but it is not really their own domain. I know in the log run it best to change the domain name. I am afraid of a significant drop in Google Places traffic when I change to a new domain. Has anyone dealt with type of situation?
Web Design | | Joshen0 -
Aged .com domain or brand new .co.uk for UK site?
Should i buy a 2 year old .com domain or brand new .co.uk domain for a site i am making for UK (google.co.uk optimisation). I am struggling to find good aged .co.uk domains, there are loads of nice .com's that are old, any thoughts? thanks
Web Design | | SamBuck0 -
Can "poor" subdomains drop PR of the root domain?
The page rank of my company's website has dropped from a 6 to a 4 over the past year or so. In that time, we implemented subdomains for development sites to show clients progress on their websites. I noticed that our "dev" sites are being indexed while in development and my question is, will Google drop pagerank of our root domain purely off of these "dev" subdomains? Example - our site is www.oursite.com Dev site - development1.oursite.com I just began investigating the drop and this came to my mind yesterday but am not too sure what type of impact these non-credible subdomains will have on our root domain. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | ckilgore0