Renaming your domain from an existing live domain and SEO implications - Please Help *shudder*
-
Please see the details below.
Site A: http://south-african-holiday.mobi is an existing site that is our best site. It is Joomla 3.1 and runs all our ecommerce.
Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky. joomla 1.5 and all bookings (tour site) are redirected to Site A for processing.
Instead of redesigning the Site A I'd like to change the domain name of http://south-african-holiday.mobi -> http://southerncircle.com
So far my reading and research (Thanks MOZ for awesome forum!) has provided me with:
1. Do the SEO groundwork. i.e. remove dead links from both sites. Delete useless content and generally tidy up both sites.
2. Map all pages from site a: http://southerncircle.com -> http://south-africa-holiday/ so that the existing pages that have good ranking will have a home on the new site.
3. When ready do a small sample 301 redirect from: http://southerncircle.com to http://south-africa-holiday.mobi.
4. arghhhh now I'm stuck ..... If I redirect to this site then I lose my http://southerncircle.com domain which is what I want to keep....I just want the .mobi site to move to the southerncircle.com site....
I don't consider myself totally thick but this is really confuseing the *$%# out of me
PLEASE could you give me some insight here. I'm sure it has been done before without completely losing the sites seo ranking and sending my site into SEO oblivion.
If there are any JOOMLA gurus that have done this I'd love to hear from you as well.
Many thanks in advance.
-
Hello
You may also want to try rel="canonical" (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en) or find out some better services for redirection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#URL_redirection_services)
Also, and anyway, if you would like to keep your page rank, domain authority, and url, i would also suggest that you can just re write (by copy and paste) the whole best website code and structure as well as content, and have it all on the old domain. It seems to me the best solution, at least unless its not to hard to re create the website..
hope it helped
eugenio
-
This is totally awesome response! straight forward and systematic! Thank you soo much for this. I'm going to leave the question up for a bit longer to get more feedback but this is exactly what my research has told me to do ..just not so succinctly.
-
Hi Patrick.
Here's what I would do:-
1. Carry out a site crawl of http://southerncircle.com and make a record of all of the URL's. If you don't have any software for doing this then use ScreamingFrog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ - There's also a really good guide for using ScreamingFrog here - http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide.
2. Make sure that both of the domains are set-up and verified in Google Webmaster Tools for both www. and non-www.
3. Make full back-ups of both your http://southerncircle.com and your http://south-africa-holiday.mobi domains (database and files) keep these on file just in case you need them again.
4. Migrate your http://south-africa-holiday.mobi site over to your http://southerncircle.com domain hosting account.
5. Add a site redirect to the .htaccess file in the root of the http://south-africa-holiday.mobi domain. For Joomla just add this :-
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
redirect 301 / http://www.southerncircle.comThe above will move your .mobi site over to the .com and make sure than anyone visiting the .mobi site will redirect correctly. You now need to make sure that you keep any of the link equity that you had in the .com site.
6. From the list of URLs that you took in step 1 you need to work out the most relevant page on the new site to redirect site visitors to. Within the .htaccess file of the .com domain you now need to set-up redirects for all of these URL's. A brief visit to Google will show you how to set these redirects up but basically:-
redirect 301 /old-page http://southerncircle.com/new-page
This should look after all of the redirects but just to make sure it is worth while just checking that you haven't missed out any important pages that have links pointing to them by carrying out an orphaned link check - http://www.teapotcreative.com/blog/entry/finding-and-fixing-orphaned-links-using-majestic-excel-and-screaming-frog
7. Inform Google of a site address change via Google webmaster Tools.
8. Carry out a canonicalisation check on the .com domain - http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/ - and fix any issues.
9. Add the new site to a Moz Campaign to check for any site errors.
-
This should be of great help: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
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
-
Audit my SEO Project
Hey professionals, I works on "MyInfo Community" as a SEO worker, anyone can help me to audit my this project? Because i am newbie in this field. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartpoedgr0 -
Changing existing URL to boost SEO
What's best practice regarding changing URLs for SEO? If the page contains great information around a particular term but the URL is not reflective of this and thus the page isn't ranking should the URL be changed? Or is it always a hard and fast no? It would seem to make sense to me if the page didn't have any backlinks already and Organic clicks were minimal. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Samsam00000 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Outbrain Select SEO Implications
A member of our marketing team wants to use Outbrain Select to curate content to augment the original content we have on our site. http://www.outbrain.com/select/how This content would be taken from other pages on the site and shown through as though it is on our site through javascipt. Obviously this page would be setup as a no-index. This seems to me like something Google would frown on. Does anyone know the SEO implications behind using a tool like this? I'm concerned google will see links to a blank page no-index page and find it suspect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LyntonWeb0 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
Domain registered with US provider; hosted with UK - SEO effects?
My boss wants me to register a domain with a US company. However, most of our customers are in the UK. Though I would host any future website using a UK hosting provider, I don't know if registering the domain with a US provider would make any difference SEO-wise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
Can someone please help me understand my sites recent loss of rankings?
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. I have a Page Authority of 53, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 40, user reviews and quality content. I did discover that another URL I using was set to a 302 instead of a 301 for some reason. I don't necessarily think this was an issue as Google should know which is the trusted URL and therefore which content to list. I removed this redirect completely about 3 weeks ago, but I've seen no improvement. I'm looking at improving various things, but I'm still not sure why I've been hit and wonder if I'm missing something obvious? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Need help/insights. Site SEO = OK, Authority BLs = OK, Rank page #1\. How to reach pos #1?
Hi there! Some doubts are confusing my head and need some assistence from you to get on the right track. I'll explain my situation and want to hear from you what do you really recommend for med/long term permanent results. 1 - I have a PR2 (.com.br) domain; 2 - I'm talking about little/med competition micro-niche keywords; 3 - I got all pages I want to, indexed (I have a well SEO constructed website with internal link building); 4 - If a keyword has average competition, I'll already start ranking in page #3 on the SERP's; For a few low competition keywords I start on page #1; 5 - I do a little whitehat link building, 1 or 2 backlinks on authority sites and then like 15 days later I came to page #1, generally on position 9/10; And then I got stucked 🙂 No more authority sites where I can get backlinks... I do some posts on the company twitter/facebook page's, but they are no follow, so I don't really now if this can help. (never see a SERP result). I did some "blackhat" stuff to see if it really work: I can say for sure the "profile backlinks" that we can buy from some sites doesn't work (maybe it's just for me). I can't see it on webmaster tool and neither my ranks changed since I bought a pack of 100 links (the links are working, I see it one by one) to test. Maybe the problem is about the domains, cause my site is .com.br and I'm buying .com profile links. I guess google understand backlinks from .com.br more valuable for my sites. Back to whitehat: I wrote some articles and posted it the right way, of course on .com.br articles sites, got it indexed and can see the backlink on webmaster tool, but no change on SERP's. (maybe this can be a long term result and I'm not seeing it yet). I'm really "scratching my hand" to do some blackhat stuff, but I don't want to lose what I already have done... I heard a lot about scrapebox but doesn't fell confortable to spam as hell a lot of blogs. I really want long term permanent results (my sites are totally whitehat/corporate sites). Can you expert guys give me some point to where I need to "walk" now to improve the SERP's? I never reached top #1 and want to try to rank at least one time to understand how this can be made... I'm thinking now to pay someone to rewrite 20 copies of an article and up it on some sites, to see if 20 can improve something. But still no confident, because it will cost like $100 for a good writer do it for me on my language. Maybe I can do better things with 100 bucks. I guess I did the path right: Internal SEO -> got indexed -> backlinking from authorities -> new articles backlinks to me (is it ok at this position or no?) -> (what next ?) I know SEO is a hard/never ending work, but what I'm trying to get cleaned on my head is the path of the work (if a right path really exists). Every word will be apreciated. What do you can suggest to me to try now? (please give me a hint to see SERP's results 🙂 if I feel that something worked, no matter how it can cost to me, but I'll pay for the work happily) Sorry if I'm a little confusing, english isnt' my first language. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | azaiats20