Value of domain name for domain authority. Please help to figure out!
-
I am doing SEO for an appliance repair company. Their company website's domain doesn't have high authority, and I am going to increase that by link earning and content improving. I think a better domain name might also help me out. The current URL contain the word "appliance" but doesn't have "repair" in it. I am thinking a new domain that would contain both keywords will serve better. Could you please share with me your thought on this? Am I in the right direction, or not at all?
I know Google penalizes mirror sites since this they are considered as duplicated content. I'll upload my content to the new domain and make the old one point to that new URL. I am wondering if canonical might help? Or 301 redirect will be a better solution? Any advise would be highly appreciated! Thank you!
-
Thanks for sharing your experience! I'll look for the blog post on this topic for sure.
-
The new gTLD domain names are, in fact, treated exactly the same as any other TLD such as .COM, .NET, and .ORG by Google. They even wrote a blog post about it. However, we have been seeing very good results when it comes to using keyword rich new gTLD domain names.
-
Thank you for your idea! It haven't even crossed my mind since some time ago I read that .toys, .repair, etc. domains are quite far from competition with .com, .net, and .org.
-
You may want to consider a .REPAIR new gTLD domain name. One of the keywords is in the ending (in the TLD), and we've seen good results when sites have migrated to an appropriate new gTLD domain name. In your case, you may be able to get a really good, short, memorable .REPAIR domain.
If you migrate the old site to the new .REPAIR domain name using 301 redirects and the Google Change of Address Tool, you won't see any negative effects--your rankings may in fact get better.
-
Glad to help!
-
Thank you very much, that helped a lot!
-
Even if you're not linking back and forth, you're still diluting your SEO value over many domains, as opposed to providing one place to demonstrate expertise in your niche. However many domains your spreading your content over, is how many times you'll be duplicating some of your work. Say you have 5 domains, one for each appliance type, then you're reporting and conducting analysis for 5 sites, you're updating 5 XML sitemaps & 5 robots files, 5 different sites to get/monitor reviews for, 5 sites to monitor rank for....you get the point. Additionally, if you get a really good link for _one _of those sites, it only benefits that domain, whereas if you're operating all under one site, that link helps all service lines, not just the one whose domain got that link.
-
But I wouldn't be linking back and forth. All I would do is providing my phone number and service request form. Would that be the reason to penalize me?
-
If they can determine that they're connected (which is highly likely since you'd be linking back and forth), all of them.
-
What do you think Google exactly would penalize in this case? Microsites or my company original website?
-
That's getting a bit into the black-hat realm. I would stay away from any strategy where you have microsites for each service offered. Linking back and forth between microsite domains like you mentioned is going to look very sketchy to search engines. These days, SEO is much more about the quality of your content and how much of an expert you are in your niche, and less about the keywords you can stuff in your site.
-
Thanks for your reply! Would you agree that AirConditioningRepairHouston.com might not have SEO value at the moment, but if it is optimized for the keyword "air conditioning repair" and has my company contact info, my company would benefit overall? Especially if it has stoverepairhouston.com, refrigeratorrepairhouston.com, etc in its disposal? Or it is considered to be a black hat SEO?
-
Hi,
I'd stick with the domain name you're currently using. There is no SEO value to what domain you have. This used to be true ~10 years ago, which is why you see a lot of domains out there like AirConditioningRepairHouston.com, etc.. You may not have much domain authority right now with the current domain, but if you switch, you'll have zero. Additionally, any links you already have will lose about 10% of their value when you redirect them to a new site.
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
-
301 Domain Redirect from old domain with HTTPS
My domain was indexed with HTTPS://WWW. now that we redirected it the certificate has been removed and if you try to visit the old site with https it throws an obvious error that this sites not secure and the 301 does not happen. My question is will googles bot have this issue. Right now the domain has been in redirection status to the new domain for a couple months and the old site is still indexed, while the new one is not ranking well for half its terms. If that is not causing the problem can anyone tell me why would the 301 take such a long time. Ive double and quadruple checked the 301's and all settings to ensure its being redirected properly. Yet it still hasn't fully redirected. Something is wrong and my clients ready to ditch the old domain we worked on for a good amount of time. backgorund:About 30 days ago we found some redirect loops .. well not loop but it was redirecting from old domain to the new domain several times without error. I removed the plugins causing the multi redirects and now we have just one redirect from any page on the old domain to the new https version. Any suggestions? This is really frustrating me and I just can't figure it out. My only answer at this point is wait it out because others have had this issue where it takes up to 2 months to redirect the domain. My only issue is that this is the first domain redirect out of many that have ever taken more than a week or three.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
What is the best practice for redirecting a lower authority TLD to a high authority TLD?
Hi there moz community! My organization is blessed with an extremely high authority TLD (91). Powers-that-be want to start using a lesser authority (though still a respectable 62) TLD in marketing materials because they think it's more memorable/less confusing for users. We currently have a 302 redirect in place from score-62 to score-91, and our situation relative to the engines is strong. However, if they ramp-up a branding campaign using the 62-score TLD, should we change the 302 to a 301? I don't want to risk infecting that 91 score with any juice relative to the score-62 TLD. There isn't a lot written for the best practice in redirecting a lower-authority TLD to a high authority TLD - almost all the literature is about preserving your score/juice when redirecting an old TLD to a new TLD. Thanks for anyone/everyone's help! Brian Alpert; Smithsonian Institution
Technical SEO | | Smithsonian1 -
Country Specific Domain
Guyz, we are new startups and have one very simple question regarding domain name. Should we use example.com or example.com.au ? Our Goal initially would be to target customer from Australia and gradually go global. So if we opt for .com.au we may have an edge in terms of local SEO in the beginning but lose out in the long run. What is the best way to tackle this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Does a sub-domain benefit a domain...
I have seen some mixed comment as the whether a sub-domain would benefit from the authority built up by its domain... but does a domain benefit from a sub-domain?
Technical SEO | | Switch_Digital0 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
For Google + purposes, should the author's name appear in the Meta description or title tag of my web site just as you would your key search phrase?
Relative to Cyrus Shepard's article on January 4th regarding Google's Superior SEO strategy, if I'm the primary author of all blog articles and web site content, and I have a link showing authorship going back to Google Plus, is a site wide link from the home page enough or should that show up on all blog posts etc and editorial comment pages etc? Conversely, should the author's name appear in the Meta description or title tag of my web site just as you would your key search phrase since Google appears to be trying to make a solid connection with my name, and all content?
Technical SEO | | lwnickens0 -
Domain Redirect Issues
Hi, I have a domain that is 10 years old, this is the old domain that used to be the website for the company. The company approximately 7 years ago was bought by another and purchased a new domain that is 7 years old. The company did not do a 301 redirect as they were not aware of the SEO implications. They continued building web applications on the old domain while using the new domain for all marketing and for business partner links. They just put in a server level redirect on the folders themselves to point to the new root. I am on Tomcat, I do not have the option of a 301 redirect as the web applications are all hard coded links (non-relative) (hundreds of thousands of dollars to recode) After beginning SEO; Google is seeing them as the same domain, and has replaced all results in Google with the old domain instead of the new one..... My questions is.... Is it better to take the hit and just put a robots.txt to disallow all robots on the old domain Or... Will that hurt my new domain as well since Google is seeing them as the same? Or.... Has Google already made the switch without a redirect to see these as the same and i should just continue on? (even the cache for the new site shows the old domain address) Old Domain= www.floridahealthcares.com New = www.fhcp.com *****Update after writing this I began changing index.htm to all non relative links so all links on the old domain homepage would point to fhcp.com fixing the issue of the entire site being replicated under the old domain. I think this might "Patch" my issue, but i would still love to get the opinion of others Thanks Shane
Technical SEO | | Jinx146780