Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Moving from a .org to a .com
-
We have been a .org website for as long as the web as been around. We just recently got the .com for our organization and wondered what the transition process would be like. We offer a lot of content to help parents with parenting and so as a content driven site we have about 13k external links and 1,200 linking root domains links to our site. Will we loose all our links in the transition to the .com? Is there a way to do this well that helps our brand and also retains our google ranking? Thanks so much for any and all help.
-
Hi there,
If you have the potential to acquire movieguide.com, that's a great domain name. That said, you're right that this is a crazy competitive space and some of the competitors are giants like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes!
One option is to buy the .com and redirect it to the .org. If you engage in offline advertising (magazines, on the subway, etc.), you could use the .com because it does look more professional. You could have the .org continue to be the resolving website, after the .com is 301 redirected.
We are always hesitant to recommend redirection (especially of an entire domain) if you don't have to due to the risk of lost rankings. The rankings are usually not too hard to get back, but it's never a sure thing.
-
Hi,
CleverPhD has a great response, but I wanted to add specifically that if you do this move, you will not lose the authority of those 13k links / 1,200 linking domains if you do the 301 redirection process properly. The guides linked to in CleverPhD's comment will help.
301 redirects pass the majority of authority from one URL to another, but you may also want to create a list of the top linking websites from that 1,200 and contact them after you have completed the move, asking them to update their links to you. This will ensure that you retain your best links on top of properly redirecting all the others.
-
Question - why move to the .com? If you are a non-profit, you want to stay .org and just redirect the .com to your .org.
If you are moving to the .com, it would be like any other domain name move. The key, you need to really plan your move and make sure you have your 301 redirects in place that is specific as possible for all of your old pages pointing to new pages. In other words, don't redirect everything to your new home page. Ideally, your redirects should be 1 to 1. Old page A on .org redirects to New page A on .com. Old page B on .org redirects to New page B on .com. Rinse repeat for as many pages as you have. Yes, it is tedious, but yes worth it if you do want to retain your traffic and rankings. The more work you do prior to the switch the better.
I would advise you to read everything about the Moz migration from SEOMoz
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/
Also, lots of Domain Name Transfer - Site Transfer Type Checklists
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/29/big-content-site-migration-tips/
Good luck!
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
-
Moving site from www to non www and also hosting to vps what will be the effect?
Hi SEO gurus,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoBlogs61
I am trying to move my site from shared hosting to VPS hosting and also moving from www to non www version.
What is the best possible way to avoid any issue and without losing the backlinks.
Is it good or bad to do? URL: https://buylikesservices.com/0 -
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco0 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Changing from .com to .com.au
Hi All, we are looking for some guidance please, if at all possible. We have .com domain (the domain is older than 10 years), we have been using it for 2 years. We also have .com.au version of the domain (the domain is 2 years old, pointing to the .com domain) and isn't being used. We are an Australian based company. Our question is, should we be using .com.au instead of .com and if so, how would you advise going about doing the change over without having huge SEO impact on our business (negatively). We are on the home page for most of the searches we have optimized for, but we are always below the .com.au's - which is why we are considering the possibility of the move? Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creativeground0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
Redirect posts from a wordpress.com blog over to a self-hosted blog
Hi All I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter. I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain. How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com. I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blacey0 -
I have a .com site but I am only ranking good on google for Canada and not the USA.
We are located in Canada but sell our products world wide. We are ranking ok on google.ca but are not in the top 50 on google.com. Is it due to my ip address? Is there any tips that you can give me to help up my rating for google.com. Any info you can provide me with will be amazing. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewzal0