Experience of moving to a new domain
-
Hi all
just wondering if anyone has ever had any experience / tips / advice.
moving from domain name a to b is well published all over the web and the practice is often discussed on here.
but my question is has anyone ever done moving the domain from a to b and then after x time move back to domain a.
i can't find any examples, notes anywhere on Google.
thanks in advance
-
Yes I have recently done something similar 2 times. One time for a local company which had a SEO targeting an geographically unsuitable service area for my client. It is a traffic school operating in a large city situated next to an even larger city. The SEO took a new domein xxxcity.nl and focused the keyword strategy on this as well. But how do the instructors pickup and drop off students in city A north and city B south within a hour or 90 minutes. Never going to happen 8 times a day on time. And it doesnt convert well either because people now this when the see an offer.
But I undid the city in the url part by copying the website enterely and placed a simple php script in the WordPress index.php file in the root. This replaces the domain for all request and redirects with a 301. The destination domain is the domain the client previously used.
// Permanent redirect of all PR from A > B
// Get http request headers for requests on old page
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];// Get the path after the old domain to redirect to corresponding page on new
$url_path = parse_url($uri, PHP_URL_PATH);// drop the city from the url and go to new location
$location_new = 'http://www.xxxrijschool.nl' . $url_path;// send 301 and load destination url
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $location_new");exit();
?>The above script I place on the old domain A but only after copying the whole website to the new domain B. If it's a 1-on-1 copy then this script is places on A. Thats all. It will cost some PageRank to move 2 times for 1 page but the transfer starts in a few days and will be noticeable in 2 weeks or so. After 6-8 weeks it will mostly be moved and normalize from there on. If in between we optimize on-page and aquire good backlinks then it will turn the decline of rank and can outperform the old site in a matter of 8 weeks.
For larger and large site it's recommended that the time to live for DNS records is set to 5 minutes at least a week in advanced, This is recommended by google somewhere in the guide for transfering domains in webmaster tools I believe.
Hope this helps/
Gr Daniel
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
-
.co.uk to .com domain move Dec 26th, still 40% down - do I risk moving back? (desperate)
Hi All, I'm desperate for a bit of advice. I run www.tyrereviews.com which has been my project since 2006, and after LOTS of hard work over 15 years held 1000's of P1 positions in the SERPs. I recently moved from the original .co.uk to .com to aid with future internationalising plans. I was very careful not to change ANYTHING else, just 301 from the UK to the .com and updated everything in webmaster consoles. My background is development and I spent weeks triple researching everything to make sure I followed all the google best practices, as this is my life's work and primary income source. From a tech point of view the change went perfectly, but sadly google quickly started deranking the new domain, and now two months on it seems to have stabilised at around 40% down on traffic year on year and mostly dropped from the UK region. This is mostly from medium to long tail keywords. One such example is "Michelin Primacy 4" in google UK, old webmaster tools is showing my average position this time last year as 1.4 and now I'm 12.4! The .com site is geo targeted to the UK by both webmaster tools and href lang tags. So, my question is, so I keep waiting, or do I give up andrisk the switch back to the uk domain before it's too late? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyreReviews0 -
Can new domain extensions rank?
Hi Does anybody know if it's possible to get domains with extensions like .party or .world to rank? Even for high competitive keywords? Can they rank over .com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeWU0 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Domain Authority
Hi Our website Domain Authority isn't as high and was wondering why it's not increasing. Compared to 1 or 2 competitors we're not scoring as high as them. Are rankings are good for all chosen keywords. Just trying to get a better handle where our site is falling short on.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia1 -
Using Webmaster Tools to Redirect Domain to Specific Page on Another Domain
Hey Everyone, we redirected an entire domain to a specific URL on another domain (not the homepage). We used a 301 Redirect, but I'm also wondering if I should use the Google Webmaster Tools "Change of Address" section to redirect. There is no option to redirect the old domain to the specific URL on the new domain within the "Change of Address" section. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
E-commerce Adding New Content - Blog vs New Page
I have an ecommerce site (www.brick-anew.com) focused on Fireplace products and we also have a separate blog (fireplacedecorating.com) focused on fireplace decorating. My ecommerce site needs new content, pages, internal links, etc... for more Google love, attention, and rankings. My question is this: Should I add a blog to the ecommerce site for creating new content or should I just add and create new pages? I have lots of ideas for relevant new content related to fireplaces. Are there any SEO benefits to a blog over new static pages? Thanks! SAM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0