Switching Url
-
I started working with a Roofer/Contractor about a year ago. His website is http://www.lancasterparoofing.com/. The name of his business is Spicher Home Improvements. He used to have spicherhomeimprovements.com, well he still does.
He was focusing on Roofing and Siding but now would like to branch to other areas like Interior remodeling. So adding interior work under LancasterPaRoofing.com is not applicable. I do not think starting another domain and having two is the best option.
I think he should go back to using SpicherHomeImprovements.com and I assume he would take a small hit but in time he should be better off.
Plus the url is more applicable to the real name of his business.
Thanks for any feedback I receive.
Chad
-
Thanks to Davinia, Moosa and Federico for taking the time to reply.
-
Chad, if I would have been at your place, I would have gone to the same option as you are going.
It’s not search engine only but you have to care about users as well… Although search engine might understand that your domain name is focusing one service but you are offering additional services under the same umbrella but for people you should be clear that you are offering related services as well and not sticking up to roofing only.
My idea is to go with the company names domain and 301 the current website to the new domain page by page so that page level link juice can be transferred. Due to redirection a bit of a link juice will be lost but powerful content marketing and link building can help it regain their positions.
Hope this helps!
-
Hey Chad,
He will definitely loose some value, however, if there's still some juice flowing from the old domain, regaining it will get that "loss" that you were having redirecting to the new domain back.
I agree with your idea, it will be much better if he use the old domain instead and cover all the services he provides.
Remember to follow all the necessary steps when changing the domain, 301 the entire domain to the old one, changing it via GWT, etc. The loss should be minimum, it will be noticeable during the first 1 - 3 month, but in the long run it should be a win.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Chad,
A domain with 'roofing' in it could be confusing if the business offers additional services, however is not the end of the world if your search engine result page snippets clearly outline what services are provided (i.e. title tag and meta description).
In an ideal world you would never change URLs, especially not the root domain as you can lose SEO goodness of that page. But if you need to then be sure to use a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one and make the links from relative pages (e.g. use a 301 redirect from www.LancasterPaRoofing.com/waterblastering and point to www.spicherhomeimprovements.com/waterblastering). You will also need to inform Google of the new domain via Google Webmaster Tools. And, you should manually go and update URLs on external websites. You will need to keep the old website live for at least 6 months.
Good luck,
Davinia
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
-
Pages with URL Too Long
I manage a number of Shopify stores for ecommerce clients. MOZ keeps kindly telling me the URLs are too long. However, this is largely due to the structure of Shopify, which has to include 'collections' and 'products'. For example: https://domain.com.au/collections/collection-name/products/colour-plus-six-to-seven-word-product-name MOZ recommends no more than 75 characters. This means we have 25-30 characters for both the collection name and product name. VERY challenging! Questions: Anyone know how big an issue URLs are as a ranking factor? I thought pretty low. If it's not an issue, how can we turn off this alert from MOZ? If it is an issue, anyone got any ideas how to fix it on Shopify sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Google tagged URL an overly-dynamic URL?
I'm reviewing my campaign, and spotted the overly-dynamic URL box showing a few links. Reviewing it, they are my Google Tagged URLs (utm_source, utm_medium_utm_campaign etc) I've turned some internal links to Google Tagged URLs but should these cause concern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Strategy After Switching To HTTPS
So we made a big mistake with our website last month. Without thinking things through, our entire website was switched to using a SSL certificate and https urls on all pages of the site. I know it is recommended that SSL is only used on sensitive pages, but we have a lead form on all pages. Of course Google is taking some time to adjust to all of our urls changing. A week later we lost all of our Google search rankings. It has now been about 3 weeks and our site is showing some signs of recovery, but obviously we'd like a quicker recovery. We have done proper 301 redirects throughout the site, but unfortunately our CMS has been a little buggy creating some other problems to fix along the way. So my main question is, how can we speed up the process? I do understand that we stand to lose 5-10% value of our old links due to the redirects. Is there anything else we should be doing to recover quicker though? Also, at this point, would it make any sense to switch back to http urls? Or would that just delay things further? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BorisD0 -
Overly-Dynamic URLs & Changing URL Structure w Web Redesign
I have a client that has multiple apartment complexes in different states and metro areas. They get good traffic and pretty good conversions but the site needs a lot of updating, including the architecture, to implement SEO standards. Right now they rank for " <brand_name>apartments" on every place but not " <city_name>apartments".</city_name></brand_name> There current architecture displays their URLs like: http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=overview</client_apartments> http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=floorplans&floorPlanID=121</client_apartments> I know it is said to never change the URL structure but what about this site? I see this URL structure being bad for SEO, bad for users, and basically forces us to keep the current architecture. They don't have many links built to their community pages so will creating a new URL structure and doing 301 redirects to the new URLs drastically drop rankings? Is this something that we should bite the bullet on now for future rankings, traffic, and a better architecture?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit0 -
Sudden increase in number of indexed URLs. How ca I know what URLs these are?
We saw a spike in the total number of indexed URLs (17,000 to 165,000)--what would be the most efficient way to find out what the newly indexed URLs are?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Changing a URL structure within a site
Im moving a page over from www.domain.com/page to www.domain/category/page currently www.domain.com/page is ranking in google. Would a 301 do the job? is there anything else needed to help keep SE positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Best way to migrate to a new URL structure
Hello everyone, We’re changing our URL structure from something like this: example.com/index.php?language=English To something like this: example.com**/english/**index.php The change is implemented with mod_rewrite so all the old URLs can still work We have hundreds of thousands of pages that are currently indexed with the old URL structure What’s the best way to get Google to rapidly update its index and to maintain as much ranking as possible? 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new equivalent format? If we detect that the URL is in an old format, render the page with a canonical tag pointing to the new equivalent format as well as adding a noindex, nofollow tag? Something else? Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0