How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site once this happens?
-
Hi, we will be moving a clients’ site address from one domain to another and will of course be doing 301 redirects and notifying Google of the site address change in WMT.
The problem is, that at some point in the future (say 3-6 months), the old domain will be going live with a new site as the current client does not own the domain and the owner will be wanting it back unfortunately.
How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site (new domain) once this (old domain with new site) happens? Will the site address change be enough to keep the rankings but it will lose backlink traffic? Or will rankings go down since the 301 redirects will in essence no longer be in affect?
Many thanks for your help in advance.
-
Completely agree with John. I saw a couple of cases like this one.
Another important thing besides the outreach program, it's to keep all the content and continue developing it. This advertising site StarterDaily (previously Zapping Latam) had this problem with less time (a couple of weeks) keeping their rankings. Now also ranks for the "zapping latam" brand term when it shouldn't.
-
In short the rankings will go down - as the juice being passed from the links will no longer flow.
However if I was you, I would undertake a link audit immediately. Then create an outreach program targeting the most important links and seek to get those backlinks pointed directly at your new website. If you do this quickly and well it will devalue the old site when it is relaunched, making it less relevant. Additionally it will let you try and maintain rankings. It is almost the perfect detox link program... in some way.
Hope that assists, and I hope I understand your exact dilemma.
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
-
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file - will that have an impact on the way our site is crawled?
Our parent company has included their sitemap links in our robots.txt file. All of their sitemap links are on a different domain and I'm wondering if this will have any impact on our searchability or potential rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tsmith1310 -
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site
We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly: www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and: is mineral water alkaline = 1.3 kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6 kangen water pyramid = 1.2 ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph) But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content. Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | karasd0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
If you remove a 301-re-direct, will there be a corresponding drop in traffic?
We built a better version of a search results page and re-directed from the old search results page to the landing page, and are seeing a huge uptick in traffic. Wondering if we remove the re-direct and 404 the original search results page if we'll see a drop in traffic. I ran the search results page through open site explorer and Google Webmaster tools, and there aren't many links, but the search results page used to see quite a bit of of traffic over the past couple of years.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Buying Domains from an auction and 301 redirecting to your new site.
Lets say I have a website in not to competitive niche. I was considering buying a few aged domains from godaddy auctions and 301 redirecting them to my new domain. Can this alone be enough to rank pretty high for a uncompetitive niche? Can this also be a link building technique in itself since the link juice from the domain purchased carries over? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Any resources for targeting sites towards long-tail keywords or broad match traffic?
I've been looking around, but haven't had much luck finding info or case-studies on targeting long-tail keywords or broad match traffic. So, for example, trying to target a site about used toyotas. (Not my term, but provides a decent example) Theres more motivated traffic searching "2002 Toyota Camry" than "Used Toyotas". While Used Toyotas make more sense for a site theme from a visitor perspective, I would rather have an article on my site rank for the easier keyword of say Blue 2002 Toyota Camry. I make more money from long tail keywords than Used Toyotas. Any thoughts or references about increasing those rankings would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MeanGiant0