Domain Name Change-Negative Ranking Effect?
-
I am considering redirecting my domain name from www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to www.metro-manhattan.com. My company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. so the new domain will be more consistent our identity. The Metro domain was registered with GoDaddy five years ago but has only been used for email and for forwarding (entering www.metro-manhattan.com will forward visitor to www.nyc-officespace-leader.com).
What is the likely hood that redirecting to the Metro-manhattan.com domain will result in a drop in traffic and ranking? I asked this question a year ago and the results were mixed. But one year is an eternity for Google. I am hoping that re-directs work better now and that if this is implemented correctly there will be no ranking/traffic/domain authority loss.
Thoughts??
Thanks, Alan
-
Well, in my views yes you will get benefit out of this change. I would suggest you to run a backlink audit of your old site and make disallow list of all toxic links. Disallow all those and put a 301 redirect as soon as you can.
Another tip, when you do it, try to change your onsite content. This will add up another plus point for your site.
I checked your site, its look amzing i think you will not only retain but will get good result. Moreover, you second domain has more branded power than the current one along with age of the domain.
So Good luck with your change.
-
Thanks, that is a very informative response!!
In our case we will change the top level domain. However the company is called Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. and we are changing the domain to www.metro-manhattan.com, really much closer than the current domain of www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Furthermore the Metro-Manhattan domain was registered about 5 years ago with Godaddy.
If the 301 redirects are done properly, do you think we can more or less retain ranking, traffic and domain authority? Or do you think we are going to take a hit?
Also, is the www.metro-manhattan.com domain OK? It does have a hyphen.
Thanks so much!!
Alan
-
Hi, Frankly there are few things to be consider while you thinking to change your domain. We did the same for one of our client but result for them was perfectly fine.
Our client, domainn was (www.webuycarstoday.com) this site was poorly developed and has very low due to Google penalty we change to (www.webuycarstoday.co.uk) as you can see we did not change brand name but the TLD. After changing its TLD, we secure top page positions for all main keywords and since than its getting good customers attention.Now, In my opinion if you moved your site permanently by using 301 redirect, it will not have major impact however, if you planning to rebrand yourselves with new business name there might be risk of fall in traffic as a result. I think, you may use the similar kind of site but with different TLD that will work.
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
-
Not ranking at all for generic term which is also our brand name
Hello, I am working with a client in the indoor / outdoor wicker furniture area. They have "wicker" in their domain. However using the moz keyword ranking tool they do not appear at all in 51+ results. There was a time that we were appearing on page 1 but then dropped off. Anyone have any ideas on what could be causing us not to rank at all for that generic term? Our google places listing does come up for when people are local to the store and search, but the website does not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creatingdigital1 -
Google Indexing & Caching Some Other Domain In Place of Mine-Lost Ranking -Sucuri.net Found nothing
Again I am facing same Problem with another wordpress blog. Google has suddenly started to Cache a different domain in place of mine & caching my domain in place of that domain. Here is an example page of my site which is wrongly cached on google, same thing happening with many other pages as well - http://goo.gl/57uluq That duplicate site ( protestage.xyz) is showing fully copied from my client's site but showing all pages as 404 now but on google cache its showing my sites. site:protestage.xyz showing all pages of my site only but when we try to open any page its showing 404 error My site has been scanned by sucuri.net Senior Support for any malware & there is none, they scanned all files, database etc & there is no malware found on my site. As per Sucuri.net Senior Support It's a known Google bug. Sometimes they incorrectly identify the original and the duplicate URLs, which results in messed ranking and query results. As you can see, the "protestage.xyz" site was hacked, not yours. And the hackers created "copies" of your pages on that hacked site. And this is why they do it - the "copy" (doorway) redirects websearchers to a third-party site [http://www.unmaskparasites.com/security-report/?page=protestage.xyz](http://www.unmaskparasites.com/security-report/?page=protestage.xyz) It was not the only site they hacked, so they placed many links to that "copy" from other sites. As a result Google desided that that copy might actually be the original, not the duplicate. So they basically hijacked some of your pages in search results for some queries that don't include your site domain. Nonetheless your site still does quite well and outperform the spammers. For example in this query: [https://www.google.com/search?q=](https://www.google.com/search?q=)%22We+offer+personalized+sweatshirts%22%2C+every+bride#q=%22GenF20+Plus+Review+Worth+Reading+If+You+are+Planning+to+Buy+It%22 But overall, I think both the Google bug and the spammy duplicates have the negative effect on your site. We see such hacks every now and then (both sides: the hacked sites and the copied sites) and here's what you can do in this situation: It's not a hack of your site, so you should focus on preventing copying the pages: 1\. Contact the protestage.xyz site and tell them that their site is hacked and that and show the hacked pages. [https://www.google.com/search?q=](https://www.google.com/search?q=)%22We+offer+personalized+sweatshirts%22%2C+every+bride#q=%22GenF20+Plus+Review+Worth+Reading+If+You+are+Planning+to+Buy+It%22 Hopefully they clean their site up and your site will have the unique content again. Here's their email flang.juliette@yandex.com 2\. You might want to send one more complain to their hosting provider (OVH.NET) abuse@ovh.net, and explain that the site they host stole content from your site (show the evidence) and that you suspect the the site is hacked. 3\. Try blocking IPs of the Aruba hosting (real visitors don't use server IPs) on your site. This well prevent that site from copying your site content (if they do it via a script on the same server). I currently see that sites using these two IP address: 149.202.120.102\. I think it would be safe to block anything that begins with 149.202 This .htaccess snippet should help (you might want to test it) #-------------- Order Deny,Allow Deny from 149.202.120.102 #-------------- 4\. Use rel=canonical to tell Google that your pages are the original ones. [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en) It won't help much if the hackers still copy your pages because they usually replace your rel=canonical with their, so Google can' decide which one is real. But without the rel=canonical, hackers have more chances to hijack your search results especially if they use rel=canonical and you don't. I should admit that this process may be quite long. Google will not return your previous ranking overnight even if you manage to shut down the malicious copies of your pages on the hacked site. Their indexes would still have some mixed signals (side effects of the black hat SEO campaign) and it may take weeks before things normalize. The same thing is correct for the opposite situation. The traffic wasn't lost right after hackers created the duplicates on other sites. The effect build up with time as Google collects more and more signals. Plus sometimes they run scheduled spam/duplicate cleanups of their index. It's really hard to tell what was the last drop since we don't have access to Google internals. However, in practice, if you see some significant changes in Google search results, it's not because of something you just did. In most cases, it's because of something that Google observed for some period of time. Kindly help me if we can actually do anything to get the site indexed properly again, PS it happened with this site earlier as well & that time I had to change Domain to get rid of this problem after I could not find any solution after months & now it happened again. Looking forward for possible solution Ankit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | killthebillion0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Please suggest! Overstuffed URLs - to change, or not to change?
Hello guys, We are in doubts about changing URLs on our http://www.fiberscope.net/ store The site was hit by Google in January and has dropped from top 3 to top 20 for most of its keywords. Now we're working on some redesign, including removing of over optimized content from it. It looks like our categories and content pages URLs are overstuffed with keywords. Here is a dilemma. Should we rewrite them and set up 301 redirect or just leave as is? I look trough the seomoz Q&A and find out that a lot of guys got in troubles after redirecting PLEASE, Suggest!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Meditinc.com0 -
Do I use a .org or .co.uk domain to help UK rankings?
Hi Guys, I own to good domains one with a .ORG and the other .CO.UK Can anyone advise which one is best to use to help UK rankings? Or does it not make much difference?? Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
How do i redirect www.domain.com/ to www.domain.com/index.php
I keep getting in my analytics www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php how do i make it consistently redirect to one version and not to both. I know about htaccess redirect and am already using this so am puzzle to which is the best one to use. below is the example .htaccess file im using. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattmillen
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php$1 [r=301,nc] which is better for SEO should i forward to www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.php0 -
Site dropped rankings when changing host from US to Spain
My site was ranked very well in the UK & US for multiple keywords but we changed hosting from the US to Spain and since then the rankings in the US & UK have dropped between 5 to 35 positions on all keywords and are showing no signs of returning 3 weeks later. What can be causing this? The site was down for about 3 to 5 hours a few days before we transferred hosting (this is why we changed hosting due to the previous hosting being down too often). It does seem as though the new location of the hosting server seems to be affecting rankings but I need confirmation on this or any other ideas why the rankings may have dropped. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0