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Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky.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
-
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
301 redirects broken - problems - please help!
Hi, I have a bit of an issue... Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year. All well and good. However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated. Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+). It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it? Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
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 -
Infinite Redirect Loop without trailing slash, please help
I've been searching for an answer all day, I can't seem to figure this out. When I Fetch my blog as Google(http://www.mysite.com/blog) WITHOUT a trailing slash at the end, I get this error: The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop **HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently** When I Fetch my blog as Google WITH the trailing slash at the end(http://www.mysite.com/blog/), it is fine without errors. When I pull it up in a browser comes up fine both with and without the trailing slash. My .htaccess file in the root directory contains this: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debc
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] My .htaccess file in the blog directory contains this: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^./index.php/. [NC]
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Do I have something incorrectly coded in these .htaccess files that could be causing this? Or is there something else I should look at? Thank you for any help!!0 -
Google penguin penalty(s), please help
Hi MozFans, I have got a question out of the field about www.coloringpagesabc.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Question is why the rankings and traffic are going down down down the last 4 months. Costumer thinks he got hit by google penguin update(s). The site has about 600 page’s/posts al ‘optimized’ for old seo:
- Almost all posts are superb optimized for one keyword combination (like … coloring pages) there is a high keyword density on the keyword titles and descriptions are all the same like: <keyword>and this is the rest of my title, This is my description <keyword>and i like it internal linking is all with a ‘perfect’ keyword anchor text there is a ok backlink profile, not much links to inner pages
- there are social signals the content quality is low The site to me looks like a seo over optimized content farm Competition:
When I look at the competition. The most coloring pages websites don’t offer a lot of content (text) on there page. The offer a small text and the coloring pages (What it is about :-)) How to get the rankings back:
What I was thinking to do. rewrite the content to a smaller text. Low keyword density on the keyword and put the coloring pages up front. rewrite all titles and descriptions to unique titles and descriptions Make some internal links to related posts with a other anchor text. get linkbuilding going on inner pages get more social signals Am I on the right track? I can use some advise what to do, and where to start. Thanks!!</keyword></keyword> Maarten0 -
Social Buttons Help SEO, 2 Questions...
Howdy Guys, I noticed a weird thing over the weekend - our main keyword has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we had dropped down to #79. On Friday I decided to change some on-page optimisation and changed the title tag and some tags. When I've ran my rank tracker this morning we have jumped up to #62... Has anyone else noticed just a simple change boosts rankings? Second Questions We took all our social buttons off the website back in January as no-body was using them but from a few recent reports I've seen having the buttons on the site help organic rankings... Is this true? Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
SEO and Pictures tool
Hello, I need to share pictures albums. I would like to know if any of you have an opinion on the best tools available to share pictures on the web? When I say 'the best tool' I mean from an SEO perspective. So, based on your experience, is there tools with which I have better chances to get my pictures indexed? Thanks !! Note: CNET has created a great article that present the major players
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0