Questions on switching domain name of my site
-
Hey guys,
I purchased a domain name on May 1st and have been running my site on it since then. At the time when I added the domain name to the shopping cart, I felt that it was the best domain name a human could possibly come up with.
But now, after two months, I am not so sure about it. And that means I am thinking of getting a new domain name and redirecting the old domain to the new one.
Give that the domain is only two months old, there is not much to lose. However, my domain name does have some valuable backlinks, and has built some credibility in the eyes of search engines. According to MOZ Open Site Explorer, its Domain Authority is 10 and Page Authority (homepage) is 20. It's not much, but I fear that if I switch the domain name, I will reset the clock and the new domain name will have to earn the rankings from scratch
That said, after searching this forum, I come across articles like this one from google and this 2012 article from MOZ that gave me some confidence.
The MOZ article is from 2102, and there have been several changes since then. Is there an updated version of that article, or another legit article on the internet that you can point me to?
As you can tell, I want to be more than sure that we don't take any hit during the migration process.
Also want to mention that the site is on WordPress -- in case that is relevant.
Thank you for your help.
-
Thank you John, Marcus:
The situation is exactly what MArcus described.
Seems like the process is going to be rather straightforward.
To answer this, "is this a brand change or just a URL change?" -- it's just a URL change for a news site and there is no official label or brand behind it.
I am familiar with the tools your mentioned, so I should be able to handle it. If anything comes up, I will update this thread.
-
anybody can help me ?
i have web site one old can not change anything with good ranking one new no ranking and work with wix
what should i do?
-
Hey
If you are simply changing domain and not actually moving or redesigning the site then this is a pretty simple process. There is much to learn from the Moz article linked above but this goes into detail beyond your requirements.
- We are not moving anything.
- Page names wont change
- All that will happen is that www.old.com becomes www.new.com
If that is the case I would suggest three main steps here
- Change the URL and implement a catch all 301 redirect to enforce that
- Add the new and old URL in Webmaster Tools (Search Console) and inform Google of the change of URL
- Conduct a link audit and request updates to links where possible
I would like to have a rank check as well so I can measure the success and you could be lazy and not worry too much at this point about the link audit or only change key links.
There is likely some nuance here and I would want to crawl the site using Screaming Frog or some such once you have actioned the change to ensure there are no hard coded URLs (widgets in WordPress can cause a few issues here). If you review screaming frog crawl data and look for all 301's you should be able to iron out any kinks that are not sorted by steps 1 and 2 above.
The only other implication is whether the actual name of the business changes - that is, is this a brand change or just a URL change? If the brand is changing then I would want to make sure you factor that into any external platforms and mentions (this is a bigger issue if you are a local business).
If you take the right steps and inform the search engines using redirections and the search consoles then you have little to worry about here.
Hope that helps
Marcus -
The 2012 article from Moz is still current. There are other more current dated articles but in short same outcome.
From what you are describing you are on the right track. Make sure you address the backlinks correctly. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
You sound like you are in safe territory by taking a considered approach. Well done.
Let me know if any more queries.
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
-
Cross Domain Canonicalization for Site Folder
Hello colleagues! I have a client who decided to launch a separate domain so they could offer their content translated for other countries. Each country (except the US/English) content lives in its own country folder as follows: client.com/01/02/zh
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch
client.com/01/02/tw etc. The problem is that they post the content in US/English on this domain too. It does NOT have its own folder, but exists righth after the date (as in the above example) Oh, and the content is the same as on their "main" domain so google likes to index that sometimes vs. the original client on the domain where we want the traffic to go. SO, is there a way to say "hey google, please index the US content only on the main domain, but continue to index the translated content in these folders on this totally separate domain?" Thank you so much in advance.0 -
Old Redirected Domain is replacing my current domain on SERPs
Hello everyone, All of a sudden a 2 year old redirected domain is replacing my current domain for 2 weeks now, my site is apitus.com and my old domain is aptitus.pe (the redirect is still working), however this only happens on my country google results (google.com.pe), if you check my site on google.com, everything looks ok even with a sitelink, which I no longer have on my country search results. Back to the issue, the first thing I thought was go to Search Console and take it out from the index, so I asked for access by uploading a file but since everything on that old site redirects to my current site I can't make such action. While still waiting for such access, is there anything else I could do?. Thanks in advance. PD: I'm adding the images of my SERPs CmzN8kY G3zZwwj
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Does the domain extension effect domain authority and ranking
We have produces a website on a .company domain extension. We have produced a good sized website with unique content. However the DA remains at 1. There are no high priority issues in the page crawl. We suspect that the domain extension may be causing a lower DA. Is this a ranking factor?
Technical SEO | | easydomains0 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
How to keep old URL Juice During Site Switch
I am switching a local businesses website to a new template. The url structure will be different. What is the best way to not loose the old urls and what content should I serve on them? For example: The url oldwebsite.com/product-a will no longer exist when I switch to the new template. I dont want to loose the current page rank and associate seo juice. At the same time, I do not have the resources to remap every page to the correct new page. My initial thoughts are to just display the homepage content on all of the old urls. Is this a good practice?
Technical SEO | | bloomnation2 -
Penalities in a brand new site, Sandbox Time or rather a problem of the site?
Hi guys, 4 weeks ago we launched a site www.adsl-test.it. We just make some article marketing and developed a lots of functionalities to test and share the result of the speed tests runned throug the site. We have been for weeks in 9th google serp page then suddendly for a day (the 29 of february) in the second page next day the website home is disappeared even to brand search like adsl-test. The actual situalion is: it looks like we are not banned (site:www.adsl-test.it is still listed) GWT doesn't show any suggestion and everything looks good for it we are quite high on bing.it and yahoo.it (4th place in the first page) for adsl test search Anybody could help us to understand? Another think that I thought is that we create a single ID for each test that we are running and these test are indexed by google Ex: <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/w08ZMPKl3R or</cite> <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/P87t7Z7cd9</cite> Actually the content of these urls are quite different (because the speed measured is different) but, being a badge the other contents in the page are pretty the same. Could be a possible reason? I mean google just think we are creating duplicate content also if they are not effectively duplicated content but just the result of a speed test?
Technical SEO | | codicemigrazione0 -
Migrating a better performing domain to a less well performing domain
I have a customer who has many domain names and assets but she's wanting to consolidate some of them to help her simplify things for her customers but mostly she wants to build up her website through which she sells products. Grief Reflection - www.griefreflection.com is a personal journal that she's keeping to process the impending death of her husband and it's also linked to her business website which sells healing from grief types of products. Storybooks for Healing - www.storybooksforhealing.com is the website through which she sells workbooks and memory books for people who want to keep the memory of their loved one alive after they've gone. I've setup both of these domains as campaigns and have been looking at the metrics for both. The grief reflection blog out performs the storybooks for healing website. If we merge the two then the Grief Reflection blog would likely become a subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com and be more fully integrated which she thinks will help her visitors not get confused while navigating her website. www.griefreflection.com has 12,637 links while www.storybooksforhealing.com has 1,462. Also, Google has indexed 380 pages of Grief Reflection and only 100 pages for Storybooks for Healing, though that may be because there are fewer pages to index. Grief reflection also has a 4.36 mozRank and 5.30 mozTrust, where Storybooks has 4.13 mozRank and 5.15 mozTrust. Should I counsel her to keep these domains separate? If not, would simply setting up 301 redirects from the www.griefreflection.com domain name to the new subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com be the way to go? Thank you ever so much for any wisdom anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | ChristiMc0 -
Mobile Domain \ URL Structure SEO questions
Hi We are making a mobile site for our site for one of our partner sites and I would like to know which one of the following URL structure you recommand as far as SEO concerned? mobile.mywebsite.com or mywebsite.mobi Also, should I worry about duplicated content on my mobile site?
Technical SEO | | CookingCom0