Thoughts on my change of address delima?
-
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains.
- internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website)
- companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website)
We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that.
My main concerns...
- From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case?
- As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we?
- Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts?
This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
-
This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch. That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do:
- GWT change of address
- 301 Redirection
- New links at time of redirection pointing to new site.
All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.
-
Can we put a percentage on 301 link dilution? We can't stay on the current domain so the question becomes what is the recovery time of newdomain.com (with Webmaster Tool site transfer) vs us.internationalcompany.com?
P.S. Thank you both for the continued responses.
-
Hi Tyler. Here's another case study that might give you some ideas about what you decide: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. From that example, you can see all the factors they took into consideration before combining the two. If it's great enough, you might convince the Corporate Website that it could be worth it.
As for the DA of a subdomain, that's not quite right. While the DA of internationalcompany.com won't be affected by the creation of us.internationalcompany.com, us.internationalcompany.com will start out as a new site. With the 301 redirection from your old domain to the new, it should pick up strength quickly, but it won't mirror the DA of the parent company's root domain. You can check this with PA comparisons of many sites that are hosted on subdomains as companies like wordpress and tumblr offer. Whatever you decide it looks like you'll need solid by in from corporate if you're working off of their servers so that you can address things like the robots.txt file, adding GWT verification code, and so on.
As a technical note, you can point a subdomain at a unique IP address by using an A Name instead of a cname in DNS. This means that us.internationalcompany.com could point at your servers as long as they have a static IP. That would give you more flexibility in working with file transfers, code and the like.
-
- The company outsourced the website to a 3rd party development company. My team has been told by the corporate office that the dev company owns the code and servers that the website resides on and we're simply using what they were paid to develop for us. To get the access that we want we'd have to buy the code and from what I've gathered it won't come cheap.
- That sounds comforting. So in this scenario a strong emphasis on establishing proper 301's and maintaining page authority should leave us in a better position than when we started?
-
Re: 1- Tough call. Why can't someone have access to the main site?
Re: 2- Subdomains now have the same DA as the rest of the domain.
Re: 3- Great company to study,
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
-
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Two Different IP address pointing to my website, does it will effect my website from SEO point of view
Due to some reason my website https://xyz.com is not redirecting to my main website domain - https://www.xyz.com so our tech team suggested - we will have the non-www name on a different IP and we'll 301 redirect that to the https://www.xyz.com. if it works does it will effect our website from SEO point of view? please let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BPLLC0 -
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Best Practices for Creating Back Links from "Thought Leader" Content
What is the best way to use articles from a "thought leader" to build high-quality links to my website? I have heard that it is possible to pay bloggers to post business articles that link back to a website. That assuming these blogs have domain authority this is a good technique to improve ranking. Is this in fact true, and if so where would I find blogs to post our content. The purpose would be to promote real estate brokerage website. Any suggestions? Is this possible, advisable, best use of quality content? Alternatively, where else can we post engaging content to create links back to our site? Social media? The nature of the content would be such topics as how to find the best value in Manhattan office of loft space rentals, etcera. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Migrating e-commerce platform (same domain). Do I need to be concerned about these changes?
We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices. I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration? title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different) meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before) h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products) additional table with product features (additional content in product pages) adding additional products to store moving to https instead of http Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same. Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go. Any thoughts?0 -
Starting out on my first site. Feedback and thoughts would be great
My first sports site is ready www.sbat.com/tips and www.sbat.com Content is going in slowly, and signed up for a pro membership on here. Looking to use this site to build up my SEO knowledge. We go live tomorrow, but any early thoughts would be great 🙂 Will be in and around here alot trying to learn from the Gurus Gary
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gillies88880 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Changing a subdomain to a full domain to rank for a keyword
We have been attempting to get our blogsite to rank for our business name(Instabill). We are now considering changing the url from blog.instabill.com to something like instabillblog.com. I have following concerns about the change; Will changing the domain really be that helpful (i.e. will the change get our blog on page one for the term instabill) We have over 350 pages of content on our blog. Will changing the domain have possible negative effects ( I was thinking of using url updater in webmaster tools and creating a permanent 301 redirect from the older url to the new) Having never changed a url for a site with this much content and seo value for my company I would like to know the following from someone who has made mistakes here before; what not to do what steps you would take to make the transition easier Any help here will be greatly appreciated. cheers, Instabill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instabill0