Maintaining Rank During a Domain Change
-
Looking to the community for any insights on our situation. We moved a decently ranked domain name that was ranking between 3rd-6th in organic search results to a new domain that we thought would serve us higher position in the long term. We went through Google's change of address tool and over a period of 2 to 3 weeks we went from being off the map with our new domain to showing up again around page 2 - 14-18th position. It seemed that our climb back corresponded to Google indexing our new urls. Each time a large batch was indexed we seemed to jump back up. But, in our last report we noticed that we didn't budge any higher and some of our non-branded keywords actually dropped a little. The old domain was "citychurchfamily.org" and the new domain is "citychurchbloomington.org". We were thinking that the latter would be a stronger domain in the long term. Any insights on why we haven't fully retained our former ranking value at this point or anything I should be focusing on? We are trying to rank for this phrase "churches in bloomington, in". Thanks!
-
Hi John,
Thank-you for your insight. Question, what tools did you use to do the quick check on our site? Was it the screaming from app or something else? Just want to learn how you did that.
I've went ahead and fixed the chained 301 redirect and fixed a number of the 301 redirects that were formerly not working as I initially thought they were.
What tools would you recommend to me for creating the static xml sitemap and do I need to do this for all the old pages on the site or just the ones with more traffic?
Also, once the static xml sitemap is created do I submit it on the new domain or the old domain? Probably a beginner type question here but just wanted to make sure
Finally, the change of address via google webmaster console happened for these domains: http://www.citychurchfamily.org/ and this: https://www.citychurchfamily.org/
Should I do the change of address for both the non-www versions as well?
Your help/insight is greatly appreciated.
-
Hey Andrew, thanks for putting this question to the community! Definitely a good one to dig into and remind a lot of people as to some of the basics.
It sounds like you've done a bunch of the things you should do to migrate your traffic. But, I've found a few things with just a quick glance that are definitely hurting your new domain's ranking ability. Here we go.
-
Your HTTP from your old domain redirects to the HTTPS of the old and then to the HTTPS of the new. Often I have seen that Google will treat chained 301 redirects like this as a 302 redirect, which may mean that some of your important citychurchfamily.org pages are not dropping out of the index. What you want to do is change the logic so that it works like this:
-
http://citychurchfamily.org -> https://citychurchbloomington.org
-
Your www.citychurchfamily.org (non HTTPS) redirects correctly, as does your https://www.citychurchfamily.org.
-
You still have a lot of pages from citychurchfamily.org that are indexed. Check out this site: search for your domain. You need to redirect all of those as I bet there is link equity there.
Another trick you can do to get your old pages that are redirected, but haven't dropped from the index yet out of the index is to create a static XML sitemap with those old URLs and submit that to Google through Search Console. Monitor the indexation (it should drop pretty quick if your 301s are correct) and once they're all out (or very close to it) then remove the sitemap.
Finally, did you do the site migration in Search Console for both http and https version of your old site? That may help as well.
Hope all that helps!
John
-
-
I honestly believe that your visitors must retrain Google about your website and organization.
When you moved away from your old domain you lost its long history of domain queries, navigational queries, branded searches, and visitor engagement. Slowly, these will return as your visitor base begins to engage your site and ask for it by name. These metrics don't flow through a 301.
This is how I believe it works for websites who owe their rankings to the strength of their tribe. Very different from websites who owe their rankings to the linkbuilder.
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
-
I have followed all the steps in google speed ranking on how to increase my website http://briefwatch.com/ speed but no good result
My website http://briefwatch.com/ has a very low-speed score on google page speed and I followed all the steps given to me still my website speed doesn't increase
Local Website Optimization | | Briefwatch0 -
Can I have multiple GeoShape Schema for one page on one domain?
Hi Mozers, I'm working on some Schema for a client of mine, but whilst doing the research on GeoShapes with my developer, we came across a potential issue with this particular mark-up. My client is B2C business, operating in numerous places across the UK. I want to use the Circle property from GeoShape to draw out multiple circles across the UK, but am I able to do this? From looking at some other websites, most seem to just have one GeoShape. Can I have multiple on the same page and same domain? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Impact of .us vs .com on SEO rankings?
Our website is hosted on www.discovered.us. I have 2 questions: 1: we have had regular feedback a .us domain is negative in SEO and in conversion (customers don't like it). We are thinking of changing domain to: www.dscvrd.com.
Local Website Optimization | | Discovered
Any insights on the impact on our rankings (if any) if we do this? 2: we are focusing our SEO global / USA first but conversions in UK are better. We currently do not have multi-language SEO setup. What would the impact be of implementing www.discovered.co.uk on SEO in UK? Thanks! Gijsbert0 -
Site Not Rankings After a Few Months
I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes: Built a new wordpress website All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws Robots.txt is setup correctly .htaccess is setup correctly new domain multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites. Yext Local listings SSL, CDN, Speed optimized Has 19 pages indexed by Google Posting one blog a week for him Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.
Local Website Optimization | | BrianJGomez0 -
Copying a Website For Better Rankings in a Specific Country
I've got a blog with some tools and business directories (https://www.webhostinghero.com). Actually my website is in English and is hosted in the US since its biggest source of traffic is from there. My second biggest traffic source is India. The issue is that while my website is really well optimized (in terms of speed), it is still slow for visitors from India. So my question is: Would it be possible to have a copy of my website on a web server located in India and use a sub-domain (ie.: in.webhostinghero.com) to access it without being penalized by Google? Would that be considered duplicate content? What would be the HREF LANG tag set to for India (EN-US, EN-GB... EN-IN??) I thought that having a sub-domain for a specific country could also help its rankings. Thanks in advance for your inputs. P.S. Sorry my english sucks.
Local Website Optimization | | sbrault740 -
What Is your view on wix domains?
For almost 3 years I am the owner of www.cheflekker.com. A wix domain.... It was sure easy to set up and still easy to change the layout. Only problem is... SEO. For the most part I find it difficult to monitor my site on areas of improvement and actually see the results. What is your opinion on the wix (ajax) program? any tips?
Local Website Optimization | | cheflekker0 -
International SEO - How to rank similar keys for differents countries
Hello MOZ friends.
Local Website Optimization | | NachoRetta
I work in an digital marketing agency in Argentina and since we have a lot of traffic from other Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Spain, we want to rank specific keywords for these countries.
We were thinking of putting new versions of the homepage in subfolders, for example /es/ for Spain, /mx/ to Mexico, etc. In these new subfolders we would place a very similar version of the homepage with a few minor modifications to work specific keywords in each country. For example, in Spain it is more searched "marketing online", and "marketing digital" is more used in Mexico and Argentina.
I have understood that to implement this we would be to place a label hrflang on the homepage directing visitors and crawlers to the correct version of each country. Is it ok?
Another concern is, whether they are very similar pages, Google does not take it as duplicate content ..
I read this:
https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
And i am not completely sure about using subfolders for each country, but i dont know how to position diferents keywords for diferent countries.
Regards,
Juan Ignacio Retta0 -
Whats in a domain name in terms of SE ranking.
I'm curious. Whats in a domain name in terms of search engine ranking and keyword searches. Let me provide an example: If I sell umbrellas in New York City and my company name is Rainy Day Umbrellas am I wise to register both rainydayumbrellas.com and newyorkumbrellas.com as a way of targeting my customers and ranking better in a single search phrase for that subject? Second question. If it is a good idea do you just forward that domain to the primary site or have a second mirrored site? Or perhaps just a landing page?
Local Website Optimization | | Bvrettski0