Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
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Domain migration via Wordpress - organic still 60% down four months later
Hi guys!Almost four months ago I performed a Wordpress domain migration. Three pet-based sites were migrated into a new pet-based one that incorporated them all - the new site is petskb.com and 240 posts were migrated.The site migration was performed via 301 wildcard re-directs using the .htaccess files in the old domains, which are still in place and working. I also used the site move tool in GSC. Afterwards, I performed an audit of the new site to ensure that all the old urls were being re-directed to the new one, which they were (and are). There have been no manual actions reported in GSC.The results have been very poor. A small few of the articles that were in the top 10 moved over and I quickly claimed the same positions in the new site. Most did not though and still sit >100 in the SERP or absolutely nowhere (or even omitted) using the main keyword.I've created about 60 new articles (using the same SEO analysis I did previously) since that time on the new site and not one of them has ranked <100 in all that time, whereas on the old sites they would initially rank somewhere in the top 50 after a couple of days and work their way up over the months. These new posts haven't moved though. The posts that were published on the new site four months ago are still in the exact same position.So, I've created new content, re-submitted the sitemap and manually requested re-indexing of the posts. Nothing has changed. I've hired SEO's and not one has found any problems with my site or how I performed the migration. Clearly there is a problem though. The original posts that were ranking previously and all the new posts have not moved in the SERP. There were a few spammy links pointing to the new domain but nothing significant, I did disavow these though - no more than on the old sites though.As a test, I created a new post on another domain which has no posts with the same long-tail keyword as one that has been on my new site for almost four months. The one I posted on the new domain out-ranked the one on petskb after just two days.Can anyone help? If you can I will personally travel to where you live and buy you several beers.Thanks,Matt
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301 Redirect Only Home Page/Root Domain via Domain Registrar Only
Hi All, I am really concerned about doing a 301 redirect. This is my situation: Both Current and New Domain is registered with a local domain registrar (similar to GoDaddy but a local version) Current Domain: Servers are pointing to Wix servers and the website is built and hosted with Wix I would like to do a 301 redirect but would like to do it in the following way with a couple of factors to keep in mind: 99% of my link are only pointed to the home page/root domain only. Not to subdirectories. New Domain: I will register this with wix with a new plan but keep the exact sitemap and composition of current website and launch with new domain. Current Domain: I want to change server pointing to wix to point to local domain registrar servers. Then do a 301 redirect for only the home page/root domain to point to the new domain listed with wix. So 301 is done via local registrar and not via Wix. Another point to mention is it will also change from Http to Https as well as a name change. Your comments on the above will be greatly appreciated and as to whether there is risk in trying to do a 301 redirect as above. Doing it as above it also cheaper if I do the 301 via the wix platform I will need to register a full new premium plan and run it concurrently to the old plan whereas if I do it as mentioned above will only have the additional domain annual fee. Look forward to your comments. Mike
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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?
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I know that questions about this topic have been asked before, but I didn't really find an answer that I could apply to our situation. We have several websites that now exist on separate domains, even though their topics are closely related. We are moving each of these sites into a new CMS and are considering collapsing all of the domains into a sub-domain structure around the strongest domain. Important to note: All of the current domains have existed for many years and have strong site authority, and regardless of the domain decision, in this restructuring we will be bringing them all under a global header. I know that there are SEO risks to moving a site from an established domain to a new one, even with 301 redirects in place, but the team in charge of this move wants to know how much of a hit we would take and how quickly natural search traffic might recover. Maybe and mights aren't really satisfying their questions... Does anyone have experience with collapsing domains into a sub-domain structure and feel like sharing your results? Most importantly, was it worth it???? Thanks.
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Which Domain is better
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Subdomain, subfolder or separate domains?
Hi Mozzers, We're in the process of re-developing and redesigning several of our websites, and moving them all onto the same content management system. At the moment, although the websites are all under the same brand and roughly the same designs, because of various reasons they all either live on a separate domain to the main website, or are on a subdomain. Here's a list of what we have (and what we're consolidating): Main site - http://www.frenchentree.com/ Property database - http://france-property.frenchentree.com/ (subdomain) Forum - http://www.france-forum-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain) Classified ads - http://www.france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain) My question to you lovely people is: should we take this opportunity through the redevelopment of the CMS to put everything into subfolders of the main domain? Keep things as they are? Put each section onto a subdomain? What's best from an SEO perspective? For information - the property database was put onto a subdomain as this is what we were advised to do by the developers of the system. We're starting to question this decision though, as we very rarely see subdomains appear in SERPs for any remotely competitive search terms. Our SEO for the property database is fairly non-existent, and only ever really appears in SERPs for brand related keywords. For further info - the forum and classifieds were under a separate brand name previously, so keeping them on separate domains felt correct at that time. However, with the redevelopment of our sites, it seems to make more sense to either put them on subdomains or subfolders of the main site. Our SEO for the forum is pretty strong, though has dwindled in the last year or so. Any help/advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks Matt
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