Branding-Advantages of New Domain
-
Our current domain (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) is spammy, using 2 hyphens and several keywords. So we are planning on migrating to a new domain. Our company is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc.. We are Manhattan commercial real estate brokers specializing in office and commercial leasing.
For 5 years we have owned an alternative domain but never migrated the site to it. The alternative domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. But I am not sure it is a good choice since it contains one hyphen.
Any suggestions for creating a strong URL for rebranding? It appears the really good names are already taken.
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Patrick:
Thanks so much for your detailed and thorough response!!!
While I have some doubts about our brand name, we were solely considering changing our very spammy sounding URL that contains the two hyphens. But from what you say, even if we do that, we may have a limitation in that the company name "Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc." contains the match anchor text of "Manhattan Office Space". So if we need to stay away from match anchor text in both the domain in the URL, this rebranding is going need to go a lot deeper than anticipated. My thoughts were solely to replace www.nyc-officespace-leader.com with www.metro-manhattan.com but this is still problematic. Perhaps a domain of www.mmos.com (abbreviation of Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc.) would be better? Or www.lastNameerealestate.com possible?
Thanks for the resources on the migration. I understand that special care must be taken regarding NAP information for the move to be successful. But I would think this is less of an issue if we are only changing the domain name.
Could we keep our company name and solely change the URL or this an incomplete job?
Are there any resources you can think that would help us think up both a new corporate name and domain name? Maybe we should consider tackling both at the same time as www.nyc-officespace-leader.com plus the corporate name of Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. don't sound like the most SEO friendly combination.
-
Hi there
You are right to assume that hyphens come across spammy in your top level domain. If it were me, I would pick a domain name that is going to branded and easy to remember. The issue I am having is your brand name sounds like exact match anchor text, meaning I would search "manhattan office space" or "metro manhattan office space" in search without even knowing your company is called that.
So, whatever branded domain you choose is going to see a bit spammy, but I as long as your local SEO and citations are consistent with the brand and NAP information, you should be okay as crawlers will recognize this as your business name.
I would also make sure that you take the time to go through this web site migration guide and a backlink audit to either remove toxic links or update the ones you wish to keep.
You have a lot of work ahead of you, but this will get you started in the right direction! 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
-
Changing domain name, witch is better - brand name.com vs keyword + brand name.com?
Hi, I just made one decision and now I'm bit worried, if I did right one. I hope that you can give me feedback and advice regarding it. I'm in hookah market, so I do not have any possibilities to buy adds, so SEO is really-really important to us. I know a lot of things what has to be done to perform better, but currently I have just few really important questions. In international market the main keyword is "hookah" and everything related to that. We are small company and our brand is not that well known and do not have high volume traffic on website. Hookah in front of that we tough will give better understanding to audience about what is the page. Which domain name is better for SEO and also branding purposes? Currently we were using the first one without keyword, no we switched to the second one (just about week ago). https://hekkpipe.com https://hookahhekkpipe.com Regarding it, some really important questions: Would the longer version of domain helps us better rank with important keywords to us or not? When we will write good content, which domain is more likely shared? I'm bit afraid that first one and that we made a mistake changing the domain name. When the 1st one, then how big difference does it potentially make? Thank you
Branding | | Karel_K0 -
Spammy brand mentions
Hi guys, Recently I started to receive via Google Alerts a lot of brand mentions on obviously spammy pages/websites like this http://www.iconshut.com/business-cards-every-matrix-has-recently-gone-through-a-rebranding--icons/ Where Every Matrix (EveryMatrix) is our brand name. It have first noticed it a few weeks ago but I started to receive this kind of alerts almost daily. There are no links pointing back to our website so I can not disavow them at least. Since it could be a negative SEO attempt, my feelings are that this kind of mentions (https://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions) will hurt on the long run and I'm concerned that I can not control it or at least I don't know how to do it. What is you take on this? What can we do?
Branding | | EveryMatrix0 -
Spam in search engine results for company brand name
Hi, I'm having a strange problem with a certain comapny. When you Google their brand name the first 8 results or so are related - their site, Google+ page, Twitter etc. The rest of the results are completely unrelated to the site and much of it is in another language and looks really spammy. According to the site owner until recently the first 50-60 results were related - mostly local results, press releases, and franchise companies listing his business. They don't have a great link profile but that shouldn't have them dropping out of the results, especially since they're still ranking in the top 1-8 positions. Here's the strangest part: the company name is Libertana. All the spammy results are not so much spammy, they're related to the syllable "na". Examples: Ivanyukite-Na Mineral Data įt$koka!na's sounds on SoundCloud - Hear the world's sounds Bosiniya na Herizegovina - Wikipedia What on earth is going on? Why would they rank for the last syllable of their name?
Branding | | storemachine0 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword?
My client has a website (brandname.co.in) The website is popular in India (we show up 1st in SERP for our brand name as the search query in Google India) but results are different in Google US, Actually we are not even in the top 10 results in the US version of Google SERP. The Domain name (brandname**.com**) is already taken by another person and he isn't using the domain but expects around $100000 for selling the domain. So we are only left with the option of buying another domain name. My client provides business intelligence consulting services/solutions. What I would like to know is can I recommend buying (brandname-bianalytics.com)? Would this be treated as keyword stuffing? Is there a possibility that my website be penalized by EDM algorithm updates for my primary keyword(bi analytics)? Please advise.
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Moving to new domain - Social and Branding Questions?
Hi, We are moving to a new domain because our rankings drastically dropped and we want to "start over". For example - If my company is called Joes Computers and the domain was JoesComputers.com and the new domain which will hold our e-commerce website will be completely different for example - BestComputers.com - which do I brand? Which do I put as suffix in all titles?
Branding | | BeytzNet
COOL TITLE FOR PRODUCTS | Best Computers
or
COOL TITLE FOR PRODUCTS | Joes Computers Which name do I take for social profiles? Company or Domain?
(We currently have for the company since it was the same). Please note that our company name is already a little bit known... and therefore inside the website it will be labeled in Logos etc. We would also state "Best Computers by Joes Computers" (as if it is a sub brand or daughter company). Thanks,0 -
Do you have to have a Google+ profile page for a person before you can build a Google+ brand page?
There was some debate at MozCon 2012 about this issue. I have my personal Google+ page which I didn't want attached to the brand of one of the sites I manage. I saw no other way to create a new Google+ page for this brand except to create a new profile under a different gmail account. The problem is, I had to put in my personal name to create the profile (you can't put in a business name, Google won't accept it), so now I have two "Dana Tan" author pages in Google+, the second one is where I built the page for this separate business "Celebrate Communion." Unfortunately, this has muddied the waters because people are following me in both places (it's fragmented my circles). I would like to add customers who are already on Google+ to my business pages circles, but the business page won't do it. Is it possible to build a Google+ business page without all of this brand confusion? If so, can you send me directions? I have found nothing online that says you don't need a profile to do a brand page. Also, once the page is built, what is the best way for me to reach out to customers with google accounts? I don't see a good way to do that on businesses pages either. On my profile page I can load all the emails into my contacts list, but then those contacts can only be added to my profile page and not the brand page. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Dana
Branding | | danatanseo0 -
Blog - separate domain or current website?
I have created a business blog purely to gain higher rankings for particular keywords which then has links pointing to the product that I am trying to sell. My question... Is it better to have this blog hosted on the same domain or shall I move it to a separate domain which will help with backlinks? Any advice would be appreciated?
Branding | | petewinter0 -
Domain Authority Mind = Blown
Hi guys, I've focused on building my domain authority for a while now, it's stll low but i'm sure it'll increase. My competitors have 0 backlinks to most of there products which is good, i guess. However they have a domain authority of around 70-80. Which is really high. There product pages get a page authority from 60-70+ which means they rank very high with no backlinks. I can easily out rank them by getting backlinks but it's a very time consuming and costs quite a bit of money to out source it. My question is... is it really all about page/domain authority? I can't see any other factors that allow them to rank high for the products. Also my mind is blown as you can create a blog with a high Domain authority such as Wordpress but that doesn't mean your blog will instantly rank high right? Is there something i'm missing with there website? I'm so confused right now! Any help would be great. Main competitor is: http://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk along with http://www.cartridgesave.co.uk (Stinkyink to be a member here actually)
Branding | | InkCartridgesFast0