The Consequences & Best Practices In Changing Domains
-
Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name.
Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates, new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to?
Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether.
Thanks!
-
I believe it took them a few years. They still had not recovered all their organic traffic when I worked on them but we did see a sharp increase in conversion rate. Revenue actually improved I think Moz has a case study out from when they changed from Seomoz to just Moz.
I would just make sure the client understands improving organic traffic after the rebrand will be a steady process. You could look at supplementing organic with a PPC campaign or venture into social media advertising and blogging until you see improvements.
Hope that helps some.
-
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for the message. How long did it take to crawl out of the 30% drop? I imagine the 30% centered around their most competitive keywords, potentially better converting is why more competitive.
What would you consider a worst case scenario?
Thanks!
-
I worked with a company that had done this same thing a few years back and experienced roughly a 30% drop in traffic and revenues. Of course with solid SEO and digital marketing you will slowly start to build everything back up. However the new branding initiative could be a good thing too and the company may see improvements in revenue.
Here are some resources to help with your rebrand:
https://moz.com/ugc/overcoming-a-rebrand-seo-search-engine-opportunities
http://searchengineland.com/rebranding-seo-important-considerations-184208
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
-
Pagination & Canonicals
Hi I've been looking at how we paginate our product pages & have a quick question on canonicals. Is this the right way to display.. Or should the canonical point to the main page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/euro-containers-stacking-containers, so Google doesn't pick up duplicate meta information? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
SEO connectivity between domains and sub-domains
Hi, My web site georgerossphotography.com and my ecommerce site store.georgerossphotography.com each reside on different servers. georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 store.georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 Clearly, they are considered two individual sites but is there any way that I can boost the performance of the primary domain by passing along some for that good SEO juice from the sub-domain? Any input would be gratefully received. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sirgeorge0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Best practices for robotx.txt -- allow one page but not the others?
So, we have a page, like domain.com/searchhere, but results are being crawled (and shouldn't be), results look like domain.com/searchhere?query1. If I block /searchhere? will it block users from crawling the single page /searchere (because I still want that page to be indexed). What is the recommended best practice for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Should I change Permalinks?
I have a site that is doing well in rankings, and its also been accepted in to Google news. I have around 800 article live on the site. My current permalink structure is - /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ What I am wondering, would it be better to change it to - /%postname%/ The reason I ask is that most of the well ranking sites and sites built by SEO companies all seem to have the /%postname%/ Will I get a benefit from changing this? I know that I could republish content have the /%postname%/ permalinks. Are there any other benefits? If the is a benefit, I'd perefr to change it as soon as possible before the site grows even more Thanks in advance for anyone who can help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Pagination & SEO
I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO. My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well. Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page? My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gracessweetlife0 -
SEO - Product Related MiniSites: Hosting & Domains
Hey Mozzers, I would first like to thank everyone in advance for replying to my question 😉 Actually, my question is 2-part: Hosting & Domains 1) We are currently researching product-related domains and would like to build-out review style mini-sites on WordPress that link back to our main site product pages. We're using X-Cart platform and X-Cart offers a WordPress module. My Dev. recommends installing a main WordPress mini-site template on my server and replicating this template under different domains/unique content, obviously ;-). -My questions is; For backlink purposes, would it be better to host these WordPress pages in a different location/server? 2) Domains (which domain extensions are the best): I have read mixed reviews on this subject ... a) Do dashes (i,e. brand-model.com) have an impact as well?? I read a post regarding this; http://www.commonsensemarketing.net/do-domain-name-extensions-matter/ - and the general feeling was that .com and .net ranked higher, faster but that .info wasn't a bad runner up. I was a bit excited to hear that .info wasn't a bad choice as they are actually "available" and cheap as well (under 3 bucks) until a comment was posted about a "Market Samurai" study. They reported testing 4 domain names (below) with the same article, date & time post . 1. domainname.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | k9byron
2. domainname.org
3. domainname.net
4. domain-name.com -My question is: Can anyone give any advise on which domain extensions work better/rank higher faster? com / .net / .org / .info / ect? Also, is it better to have more product related keywords in the domain? Example, one of my products is the "Dogtra 280ncp Platinum". WordStream exact match tells me that "dogtra 280ncp" gets 210 searches per month and that "dogtra 280ncp platinum" gets another 91 searches per month. I'm guessing that its better to buy www.Dogtra280ncpPlatinum.com instead of www.Dogtra280ncp.com as we would pick up the searches for the "platinum" term as well? Question Summary: Is it better to host these mini-sites on another server than my main site? Which domain extensions work better? Is it better to use as many product related keywords in the domain as possible and maybe even throw modifiers in there as well such as "buy" or "review"? Thanks Again!
Byron-0 -
301 from penalized domain to new domain
I have a client whose site isn't necessarily penalized since they still show for many terms in the SERPS, however at one point they did an xrummer blast of 13,000 links for two anchor texts they were trying to rank for. They have purchased a new domain and have gone white hat and want to 301 some of the old site to the new purely for the users sake so past visitors still find them at t the new location. Will creating 301 redirects pass on to the new domain any bad Karma from the old one in Google's eyes? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoshGill270