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
-
Website redesign- change of server . What to do with old site? Keep for a while or delete right away?
Hey Mozzers, Two days ago, we redesigned our website and changed the server at the same time to get faster loading times. Here is what we have done. The old site was hosted on ipage, new site with a new design hosted on UPCLOUD. We changed the A record to the new server, uploaded a new site, submitted a new sitemap to Google Search console, 301 redirected all old URLs to new ones, most have changed a bit. Old URLs were ending with " .html "the new ones do not have that at the end. Submitted AMP pages to Google as well. Now here is my question. Should we delete the old site completely from ipage or should we keep it for a while? Google has indexed the new URLs that were created with the redesign, these URLs did not exist on the old site. But it still shows most of the old URLs on SERPs (these are URLs that have been 301 redirected to a new equivalent page) I understand 2 days is not very long for Google to get everything right, but I am not sure what we should do with the old site? Keep it or get rid of it to help Google index the new one only. FYI every single old URL that appears on Google search when clicked on will take you to the right place, we made sure there are no 404s at all. As this is very important to our business and we get most of it from Google I want to make sure we do it right for SEO purposes. The agency that designed the site did not really know the answer to that question, as they do not have SEO specialists. Please help, any input you might have will be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | Davit19850 -
Pushstate and Infinite Scrolling Article Pages: Is it detrimental to not change URLs as the page is being scrolled?
I've noticed a recent trend of news sites using infinite scrolling on article pages to garner more pageviews and I can assume serve up more ads. Here is an overview. Here is an article from NBC news that uses this technique: http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/music/grammys-2016-here-s-why-adele-s-performance-was-out-n519186 Studies have shown that this technique has decreased bounce rates by +15% for some sites. My question is: If a site is using the technique without changing URLs as the user scrolls down what overall negative effects does this have? Obviously you wouldn't be getting credit for the extra pageviews but I was wondering if there were any indexation implications with this. Here is an example of article infinite scrolling without changing the URL: http://www.wftv.com/news/national-content/deputies-wife-attacks-husband-because-he-didnt-get-her-a-valentines-day-gift/87691927
Web Design | | Cox-Media-Group1 -
Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https
Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff. A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages. Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in: I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though... As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it? Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!) Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com Thank you!
Web Design | | MobileDay1 -
Domain Question
Which would be best for a client: (for promoting the product and SEO) Product on existing business website:
Web Design | | Kdruckenbrod
business.com/category/productname or a completely new domain name for the product:
productname.com Thanks for your feedback.0 -
Would iFrames From a Beta3 Help the SEO Value of Domain?
What I understand as of now: Google does crawl iframes, but attributes the SEO value of the content within them to their original site. (Let me know if I'm mistaken.) What I need to know: If I were to iframe a section of a beta3.domainname.com site into a domainname.com site, does this beta3 attribute any SEO value to the domainname.com site? Essentially - Does good content on a from a beta3.domainname.com (which is mainly just a naked piece of content) bring any benefit to the domainname.com version of the site when it is iframed into the domainname.com site?
Web Design | | SmokewagonKen0 -
For a new business which would be the best domain name?
I'm starting a new business selling Whitby Jet and I want to buy the best domain name which will help me in the search engines, I want to use the keywords in the domain name because it think it will help when people link to the website, but whitbyjet.com and whitbyjet.co.uk have both been taken. I could be wrong I think .com is generally thought of as the best and I don't really like the idea of .net or .org So maybe I might have to choose the third word which tends to make the doamin a little bit longer like whitbyjetjewlery.co.uk. Any suggestions would be greatly received.
Web Design | | whitbycottages0 -
Broad Phrase keywords as domain name
Hello, Am new here, can you advise if its good idea to buy broad phrase keywords as domain name e.g whatisagoodwebsite.com? Thank you
Web Design | | seoatbest0 -
Google search issue with exact domain
We had a site from Feb-2011 to Nov-2011 at the domain amcoexterminating.com. The site was pure HTML/CSS and the daily unique visitors steadily increased over that time. So all was fine. We then moved the site to a CMS (Joomla) on Dec. 6th. From that day forward, the daily visitors went into the tank. Before the move, if you typed "amcoexterminating.com" or "amco exterminating" into Google search, the site would be the first result (as you'd expect since those are the words that make up the actua domain). But we tried this yesterday and the site did not come up at all. NOT GOOD. It would work in Yahoo or Bing, but not in Google. So obviously, the problem with Google search directly affected the daily visitors. We just checked Webmaster tools yesterday (yes, this should have been done sooner, lesson learned) and it said "Site has severe health issues - Important page blocked by robots.txt". It listed the "important" page URL and it was just a link to an image. Regardless, I wiped out the Joomla created robots.txt file and added a new one and made it just say... User-agent: *Allow: / About 14 hours later, after the new robots.txt file was recognized by Google, the "severe health" message went away. However if I search in Google for "amcoexterminating.com", it still doesn't show up and the client is concerned (as they should be). Do you think the search engines just need more time to refresh? If so, once it refreshes, should the site show up first again right away? Or is it possible the robots.txt file had nothing to do with the issue? If so, what other things could I check into that might cause Google search to not find a site even if you search for exact domain name? Please share any and all things I should look into as I need to get this site showing in Google search again (as it was before moving to the CMS). Thanks!
Web Design | | MarathonMS0