Migrating to a new domain
-
Hi
The company I work for are planing to re-brand & come under our parent company name. This means the whole site will be moved to a new domain.
Does anyone have any experience with this and can give me some useful docs to read/any advice?
Thank you!
-
Hi everyone
Thank you for your feedback this is really helpful!
Is it worth having any placeholder information on the new domain to build up authority whilst we're in the process of the migration? Obviously we don't want it to be duplicate info however so it doesn't have a negative impact.
Thank you
-
Hi,
Thanks for the reply.
It is an ecommerce site, the company is re-branding, so the domain will come under the new company name. The new website is not live, we have the new domains and the URLs currently redirect to our current site & there is no content on the new domain.
Is it worth adding any content to this new site for now?
Thank you
-
Great thank you!
-
I believe you'll find Romans link to Moz's guide on migrating very helpful but here is another resource for some additional things to do and avoid.
-
I agree, the how to post Roman mentioned is very comprehensive in terms of what not to do and what to do.
-
Hi Becky
I think this post can help you
https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domainsRegards
Roman Delcarmen -
Hi Becky,
We are in the process of migrating our site. It's not quite same, but I would appreciate if you can be more specific with your questions as this is a huge thing to do. Is it ecommerce or just a brand promotion website? Is the new website live with existing content already or you are moving to a brand new website that you need to populate? If it's established, are you migrating under a better domain? Consider backlinks, potential duplicated content, redirects and all these things. Also, don't forget to merge everything other, such as social accounts - if this is your business objective.
Sorry for brainstorming, but if you can list more of your concerns specifically and describe the situation further, I am happy to share our experience and be more specific with my answer.
Many thanks.
Regards,
Katarina
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
-
Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong? Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PSOM1010 -
Launching Brand New Subdomain To Outrank & Outperform Main Domain
Fellow Mozzers! I have a tricky problem that may or may not have a viable solution. It's one that our team are 100% pressing ahead with regardless & I wanted to canvass some opinion on what options I have. We have the Main Company Site which has been going for +15 years, has a DA of 58 and 63,000 links pointing at it. It currently ranks on page 1 for a number of our important keywords. However.... We are now launching a Subdomain, which will be something like marketing.maincompanysite.com which we now want to drive a lot more of our traffic to. In particular for items like new customer acquisition, product discovery etc. In fact we would actually rather the subdomain outrank our main site for branded queries. However the Main Site is still important for existing customers who login to our product and we don't want to do anything that will destabilize it's rankings too much. My questions are: Are there any strategies I can use to get a subdomain (with no links or history) outranking the main site in position 1 on Google? Main site should still rank in position 2! Any other tips to actively take legacy traffic from a main site onto a subdomain seamlessly. Should we just be 301 redirecting unnecessary pages on the old site to new and improved pages on the subdomain? There will still be a 100,000+ pages on the main site, lots of authority and traffic going through it. It's not becoming redundant. Thanks so much guys - hopefully I've explained that okay!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattStott40 -
New websites
Hi Moz community, My company updated and used a new developer to build and re-design their charity websites: www.runforcharity.com, www.cycleforcharity.com and www.sportforcharity.com. This sites were "re-launched" at the beggining of December 2015 and I have now been able to get a good 6 weeks worth of data. I've been religiously using Moz.com for a couple of years and I use it simply for SEO purposes. Our websites are built upon organic traffic being driven to them and I have noticed that the PA on the new sites has taken a hammering. They all appear to have a PA of 1 and I'm at a loss why? It appears that no page has h1 text? Would this be an issue with the developer or something the content team is doing wrong? Any help of advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bennerya0 -
International Domains for SEO
My company is international and we have websites for each country with Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). I am in the US and I am seeing that other countries such as Costa Rica and Germany are ranking above us in search results. I thought Google automatically geo-targeted users by default and therefore I should only get .com or US results. Any idea why other countries would rank above our site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fastlaneus0 -
A Tale of Two (Competing) Domains
Bit of a weird one but I'm hoping someone can help our team of two sort it out. I'm a copywriter/marketer who's been learning SEO on-the-go, along with our web developer, for the past ~9 months. We've inherited what I consider to be a mess of a situation involving two main e-commerce sites. The company has a sporadic history of spinning off brands, in hopes to either build business in a new market or sell the brands off or what-have-you. The original company rose to prominence manufacturing disc packaging and selling it to software companies, which has obviously been on the way out for some time now. So they've dipped into a handful of other business products for marketing/office use. The company used to sell all products, in individual AND box quantity, on one site (since 1996). In 2012 they decided to move individual quantity sales to a different site with the domain name of one of the brands, focus it more on consumers and small business, etc. We have more flexibility to make changes to the consumer site, so in my opinion it's in better shape. The consumer site (DA 39) offers "retail pricing" with flat rate shipping and free shipping over $25. The b2b site (DA 37) offers "industry pricing" with a weight-based shipping model. Traffic on the business site is down 70% since 2010. We've also been asked to take certain products down in hopes that viewers will pick up the phone and buy a customized version from a sales rep instead. Since probably 3/4 of the products are on both sites, nearly all the category and product pages are competing in SERPs. Not only that, but the business site's product pages invariably link to the corresponding page on the consumer site -- hundreds of links pointing to the consumer site. We know for a fact that people are price checking product+shipping between our own two sites. The issues are further exacerbated because we have even more spinoff domains -- an informative site for a particularly successful product line, an e-commerce site just for vinyl products, etc. etc. So I guess I'm trying to figure out how to make the most of the situation we're now in. Our hands are somewhat tied because we're not 'decision makers'. But we've got a meeting tomorrow to talk about the future of one of the sites, so I figure I at least want to be informed. I am concerned about making further decisions without considering the consequences, especially when our bonuses are tied to web sales... I feel like this is just scratching the surface of the problem so let me know if you guys have further questions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UEUP0 -
New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?
Hi friends, I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options: Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?) Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Website domain hosting and set-up for foreign domains?
Hi, I am just wondering what the best practice is for marketing a business in two separate countries? I have a new client that wants me to create their website targeted at the UK market which for me is normal but they also want to target Australia (Probably couldn't get any further away) My initial thoughts are that the business would need two separate websites. The first one in the uk and the second website hosted on servers in Australia with different content. Is this correct? or does anyone have any advice which may simplify getting this thing off the ground. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
Different Geographies - New Domain or Subdomain?
I have a site that is successful on the SERPs for a certain geography, let's call it City A (I'm sure you can't tell what it is from my username). I'm moving to a new city in another state so I will be building my business in this area (City B). Should I create a new domain for City B with CityBWebsiteDesign.com or should I create a sub-domain called CityB.BrandableCompanyName.com and just redirect CityBWebsiteDesign.com to the URL for offline marketing purposes only? My current website BrandableCompanyName.com has some authority with Google. Will it be better to building something on the sub-domain and get any sort of cross-benefits or are there really no benefits to be had between sub-domains? The benefit of going with CityBWebsiteDesign.com would be having a keyword rich URL but I would basically be starting from zero with building authority. Specific experience you've had with this or cited examples would be great for the discussion! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit
Jared0