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
-
Changed url and now not listing
hi guys I had this page "https://www.stauntonrook.co.uk/marketing-services/offline/corporate-identity/" indexed in google at position 5 for a search term, after some research in the keyword planner I decided to change my url to https://www.stauntonrook.co.uk/marketing-services/offline/logo-design/ because I wanted the keyword in the url. I added a 301 redirect to the htaccess and removed the old page from google using webmaster tools fully expecting the new url to drop back in anytime hopefully in a better position than 5, now after a good week or so, still nothing 😞 also doesn't seem to be in any of the other search engines either I've updated the xml too any ideas?
Web Design | | Staunton_Rook0 -
New ecommerce site: Close old site and full domain redirect or keep it linking to new site?
We have rebranded and are working on our new site (B). Our old site (A) has a much higher domain/page authority than our new site. Currently we have the original Site A still there, with all links/pages pointing to the new Site B when people click. I am unsure whether we'd be best to close down the Site A completely and do a full domain redirect to Site B. Site A: 10 years age and has a moderate amount of links to it.
Web Design | | ModowestNZ
Homepage - PA: 24 DA:11 Site B: 6 months age, few links
Homepage - PA: 1 DA:2 My concern with the full domain redirect is that the indexed/ranking pages would dissapear. The benefit is less brand confusion for our niche range of party accessories.0 -
Website Home page suddenly disappeared after changing Hosting
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Last week we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. We used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Web Design | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Changing Page Extenstions
Hi all, I have a 10 year old website done in Classic ASP, which is fast becoming outdated and we are going to convert it to PHP so all of our pages would be changed from a '/page.asp' extension to a '/page.php' extension. I am familiar with the need to setup 301 redirects for this and I understand there will probably be a short term drop in our Google rankings. Naturally, I don't want to have to go through this again in the future so here is my question. Is having NO page extension, like '/aboutus/history' the wave of the future? Does having no page extension effect SEO at all? I have seen more websites using this technique in 2013 goes on so I am thinking this is the way we should plan our site update. I haven't looked into how to actually do this yet, but it would seem to make sense to me so that if we needed to change from PHP to say .NET or something else later on, we would not have to do 301 redirects again or have another drop in our rankings. Do any of you have an opinion or experience with this?
Web Design | | jacksghost0 -
Having your blog on an external domain, is this ok?
We have our website / ecomm cart with network solutions and they do not allow you to have a internal blog like www.islesurfboards.com/blog . So the only solution is to have the blog on a external domain www.islesurfboardsblog.com which we set up. Is this ok for seo purposes or are we gonna miss out on alot by doing this. Any help?
Web Design | | isle_surf0 -
Need some advice on changing website around.
I want to make some changes to my personal website and need a little help. I originally hired someone to create this site for me several years ago. Most of the site (including the home page) is html, but the blog part (/blog) is wordpress. The main site hasn't been updated in a few years (although the blog has been updated more often.) I'm not really targeting any keywords on my site (other than just my name) so I'm not really concerned about loosing any rank or anything. I"m just curious what the best route to go should be. Would you suggest keeping the site's format "as is" so to speak? (make the front page a landing page so to speak that links to my various sites, a little bio, etc; keep an about page, contact, /blog, etc...? ) Or should I go the more traditional route and make the blog the front page? Another route is to someone keep the most recent (1,2,or 3) posts on the home page (landing page) and sort of make it a landing page / recent post page. It's sort of like that now, only the main page just links to the most recent post instead of actually adding the post, if that makes sense. There maybe some themes out there that would work well, so feel free to suggest one if you know one that would work. I think the Aboutme.com pages look pretty nice and will let you use a custom domain, but I'm not sure. (And it's not a complete theme, so not sure that's the best option.) Thanks!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Wordpress SEO Change of Structure
Hi, I have a Wordpress SEO Question. I ran the SEOMOZ checker on my website and it discovered roughly 70 of my 250 blogs had a URL length problem. I have removed the year and month from the WP structure as I read elsewhere that it is not important. The blogs displayed as follows: domain.com/blog/2011/02/contents-of-the-blog and the new structure is: domain.com/blog/contents-of-the-blog I have resubmitted the new structure to Google Webmaster Tools XML and updating the on-page sitemap on my main site. My blog was cached on 25<sup>th</sup> October and seems to be caching every 7 days, my website cached on the 24th and I wonder if I should do any follow up work to ensure the content gets crawled properly. a) Individually 301 redirect the old URLs to the new. b) Individual Canonical links for each. c) Adding the old pages to the robots file and disallowing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | tdsnet0 -
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. www.direct-tractorparts.com 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?
Web Design | | DavidLenehan0