Web address change - Search impact?
-
Hi,
I have whosjack.org and wjlondon.com - on there is a London relevant news and events website. whosjack.org has been the main site for some time and has decent search pick up. Currently wjlondon.com just redirects to whosjack.org. However - having london in our actual address would be far more beneficial for us.
So ideally I want to swap the two web addresses around. Have the main site at wjlondon and have whosjack redirecting to it. However - I don't want to loose traffic from search.
An idea I had was to create a sept site at wjLondon that was a feed of social content and links from whosjack so that it starts to get a decent search and then swap them over but not sure whether that would actually be detrimental what with all the dupe content issues with google etc.
Any thoughts?
-
Hi there,
I see that it's whosjack.org that you have redirected to http://wjlondon.com/ at the moment, so I guess you have already done the migration? I see that you already have some internal pages indexed in whosjack.org, although you have also 301-redirected them to http://wjlondon.com/ (check if all the internal links go to the new URLs, also use the change of address option in Google Webmaster Tools).
Ideally, especially at the beginning, you should focus on a single domain, to consolidate your content and popularity. Additionally, you should avoid featuring the same content on two domains, since it would cause content duplication issues.
For domain migrations, take a look at these best practices, where I also link to other resources that will help you to plan and implement to minimize any errors and negative SEO impact.
I hope it helps!
-
-
If you made a site that has the same words and is not ment for a nother country you will just hurt your self
-
You need to make sure you choice of website has google web master tools picked uk for country you are targeting. It would never hurt to add a .co.uk TDL to a domain but if one ranks well 301 redrect the others to it and make sure google knows what country you want to rank in.
You will have a up to 3 month drop in ranks from changing domains London will help you but so will .co.uk so if you do this use a .uk or .co.uk with london and know you will need to 301 redrect all links and you will lose traffic before you get more for 3 months or more
I hope this helps,
Tom
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
-
URL Change, Old URLs Still In Index
Recently changed URLs on a website to remove dynamic parameters. We 301'd the old dynamic links (canonical version) to the cleaner parameter-free URLs. We then updated the canonical tags to reflect these changes. All pages dropped at least a few ranking positions and now Moz shows both the new page ranking slightly lower in results pages and the old page still in the index. I feel like I'm splitting value between the two page versions until the old one disappears... is there a way to consolidate this quickly?
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?
I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
Hi everyone, We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today? If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site. Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Tom
Technical SEO | | TomNYC0 -
What is the best way to change tons of 302 for 301...
I'm doing an audit for a new client and their website has tons of 302... (more than 1000)... What is the best/fast way to change all the 302 for 301...?
Technical SEO | | Felip30 -
Which Web host do you use?
A friend of mine has a successful website which is hosted by the company he used to use for developing his site. As he no longer uses them feels he should use it. Who do you use for hosting a small to medium sized business?
Technical SEO | | Ant710 -
How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
Hello, we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot. We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance: http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back. The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers: Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Technical SEO | | bimp
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future? I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us. Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages. Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages? Thanks for your help Cord0 -
How to change URL of RSS Feed?
Hi, There are some websites that keeps on scraping my content. I have blocked them already from accessing my website using .htaccess but they still get my content via RSS feed. I have tried delaying the RSS feed but I think this affected google rankings. My question is, is there a way to change the URL of my RSS Feed? From: http://www.mysite.com/feed to http://www.mysite.com/feed2
Technical SEO | | Trigun0 -
Is there a penalty for linking to sites that are all hosted on the same IP address?
Hi... We're doing some reciprocal link building and a gentleman has been kind enough to offer me sever additional links for the exchange. All of them (5) are on the same IP address as one of his links to which we have already linked. They are in a related field of endeavor, legal websites. If I make the swap with him, is Google going to disregard, penalize or otherwise marginalize my efforts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | hornsbylaw0