Website Domain Redirection- Rebranding Issues
-
I have a website domain redirection query
At the moment because of rebranding and domain changes I havehttp://www.physioinqnepean.com.au redirecting to http://www.nepeanphysiohydro.com.au/.http://www.nepeanphysiohydro.com.au/ is the primary domain because at the time I wanted to appease any SEO ramifications that might’ve occurred if I had the new domain at the time “http://www.physioinqnepean.com.au” as the primary domain.Unfortunately, my client now wants to rebrand AGAIN with the new website domain being “http://www.physioinqpenrith.com.au”.I wanted to gauge what would be the best SEO practice in relation to what domain should be the “Primary domain"?
-
Hello,
Early I have the same issue with this post: https://instamama.net/blog/how-to-change-instagram-name/ - previously I have 4 different versions of this page
https://
https://www.
http://
http://www.and all of this was detected by google as different URLs until I`m using the 301 redirect
So just use 301 redirects if you would like to set the primary website or page.
-
In the event that the customer's webpage/brand is definitely not a notable family/high-road name, at that point I'd expect some reaction from Google regarding how far they will try to go for your customer's site. In the event that they have recently moved space and Google has gulped that, doing it again so rapidly may make Google disregard the new site somewhat regarding slither remittance. The explanation being, the customer ought to have made their psyche up which last area they needed to move to a whole lot sooner. Should Google's crawlers endure the weights of an (assumedly) little customer's uncertainty? I'm wagering that their response to that question, would be no.
-
What do you mean by "primary domain"? Are you talking Google Search Console or something else? I assume you are not using the other domains other than to redirect?
Let me know if the above is true. You can move to yet another domain, but it is advised against as EffectDigital said because everything has to be reindexed again. It's possible to do and they'll be fine in the future, but it is going to hurt for some time.
-
First of all, if this is all happening in very quick succession I'd put across to the client that the consequences of such regular major disruption could be a significant loss of rankings. They obviously have to accept the potential consequences before forging ahead. Some rankings can be lost even with a perfect migration project which has a perfect 301 redirect implementation
301 redirects can translate up to 100% of your SEO authority from one place to another, but they won't always. If there are too many links to redirects that can make them slightly less effective. If redirects begin to chain (redirects to redirects) or if the wrong type of redirect is used, that can drastically affect the transfer and you could see as little as 0% of the prior SEO equity on your new domain
Another thing, if content is relatively different (in machine terms, think Boolean string similarity comparison - NOT "oh yeah as a person it looks similar to me") on the old and new pages, that can directly obstruct 301 redirect SEO authority transfer. Google has chosen to rank X page, if you replace it with Y content then it becomes a risk to Google. If content is mostly new, it mostly has to prove itself again (and redirects become largely nullified). To some extent you can get around this by performing backlink amendments
In your particular situation, it seems likely that left to their own devices, developers would just chain the redirects from the oldest domain, through the more recent domain to the final destination of the new domain. Do not let that happen, do check up on implementation ASAP. Do use the change of address tool in Google Search Console
If the client's site / brand isn't a well-known household / high-street name, then I'd expect some backlash from Google in terms of how far they will bother to go for your client's website. If they have just moved domain and Google has swallowed that, doing it again so quickly might cause Google to neglect the new site slightly in terms of crawl allowance. The reason being, the client should have made their mind up which final domain they wanted to move to much earlier. Should Google's crawlers suffer the burdens of an (assumedly) small client's indecision? I'm betting that their answer to that question, would be no
Be careful how much disruption you cause if you're in the small-fry boat. Google obviously don't like to encourage smaller, less valuable (from Google's perspective) ranking resources to disrupt their crawling schedules in such a disorganized manner. There could be consequences for such rapid movements
In terms of which domain should be the primary domain, I'd say that the domain which holds the highest SEO authority should be the primary domain. The domain with the best links pointing to it. Why? Because with that choice, the best links will be hitting the site directly instead of being pumped through 301 redirects (which may or may not transfer all SEO equity)
Let's look at all 3 domains now for you...
Old Domain: physioinqnepean.com.au
- Moz: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/overview?site=physioinqnepean.com.au&target=domain
- Domain Authority: 1
- Linking Domains: 0
- Inbound Links: 0
- Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=physioinqnepean.com.au
- Domain Rating: 0
- Linking Domains: 0
- Inbound Links: 0
- Majestic SEO: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?IndexDataSource=F&q=physioinqnepean.com.au&oq=physioinqnepean.com.au
- Trust Flow: 1
- Citation Flow: 4
- Linking Domains: 9
- Inbound Links: 2
Current (Newer) Domain: nepeanphysiohydro.com.au
- Moz: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/overview?site=nepeanphysiohydro.com.au&target=domain
- Domain Authority: 19
- Linking Domains: 63
- Inbound Links: 116
- Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=nepeanphysiohydro.com.au
- Domain Rating: 0.7
- Linking Domains: 22
- Inbound Links: 142
- Majestic SEO: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=nepeanphysiohydro.com.au&IndexDataSource=F
- Trust Flow: 8
- Citation Flow: 15
- Linking Domains: 28
- Inbound Links: 266
Future (Proposed)** Domain: physioinqpenrith.com.au**
- Moz: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/overview?site=physioinqpenrith.com.au&target=domain
- Domain Authority: 1
- Linking Domains: 0
- Inbound Links: 0
- Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=physioinqpenrith.com.au
- Domain Rating: 0
- Linking Domains: 0
- Inbound Links: 0
- Majestic SEO: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=physioinqpenrith.com.au&IndexDataSource=F
- Trust Flow: 0
- Citation Flow: 0
- Linking Domains: 0
- Inbound Links: 0
None of the domains are massively strong, but I'd say that the primary (active) domain (which the other domains redirect to) should be the current (Newer)** Domain: nepeanphysiohydro.com.au**
It has some kind of SEO authority. Not much, but a little. It's out of Google's sandbox (unlike the proposed new domain) and it has some rankings. If you could keep this as the main domain and redirect the client's idea for a new one, then you wouldn't actually have to move address - right? That would cut SERP disruption down to a minimum. That would mean you wouldn't have to pester Google again, with yet another migration request which could easily piss them off at this point
Just to be sure, let's check the estimated search traffic for all three domains using Ahrefs and SEMRush
Old Domain: physioinqnepean.com.au
- (Global) Ahrefs search traffic estimate chart (download) - no real performance
- (Global) Ahrefs estimated ranking keywords: 5
- (USA database) SEMRush search traffic estimate chart (download) - no real performance
- (USA database) SEMRush estimated ranking keywords: 2
Current (Newer)** Domain: nepeanphysiohydro.com.au**
- (Global) Ahrefs search traffic estimate chart (download) - some performance, surprisingly good
- (Global) Ahrefs estimated ranking keywords: 411
- (USA database) SEMRush search traffic estimate chart (download) - some performance
- (USA database) SEMRush estimated ranking keywords: 50
Future (Proposed)** Domain: physioinqpenrith.com.au**
- (Global) Ahrefs search traffic estimate chart (download) - no real performance
- (Global) Ahrefs estimated ranking keywords: 0
- (USA database) SEMRush search traffic estimate chart (download) - no real performance
- (USA database) SEMRush estimated ranking keywords: 0
This confirmed exactly what I said through link data. Estimated traffic data shows that, yes - you should stick with your current domain instead of moving anything around (bad idea!)
Hope that helps
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
-
301 redirect from OLDEST site to OLD site to a NEW site. Cons, pros, how?
Local business had a site on domain name - (A) for a 5 years. Few years ago they moved to a new domain - (B) and did 301 redirect from A to B. Now they want to move to another domain containing a keyword - (C+kw).com and apply 301 Question:
Local SEO | | Ryan_V
How to proceed with the redirect for a C+kw not to loose ranking? Which option is better?
1. Redirect from the oldest domain (A) to a newest (C)
A>301>C 2. Redirect from existing domain (B) to a newest (C)
A>301>B
B>301>C 3. Stop existing redirect from A to B, instead do two redirects to a new domain (C)
A stop 301 to B
A>301>C
B>301>C As far as I know under the same conditions a new domain will rank worse than an aged domain. On the other part keyword in domain name helps with local SEO. I think that for the long run it's ok to loose some traffic for a few months but have a better chances to rank in future. What do you think guys?0 -
One website or multiple websites
Im going round in circles with the best way to go about marketting my business from an SEO and usability stand point. My company specialise in self adhesive films and vinyls which give us quite a varied niche. Our main areas are: Window films and interior vinyls such as printed wallpaper, wall coverings, furniture wraps etc for homes and businesses - For this area we cover nationwide Automotive films such as car window tinting, car and van wraps and paint protection films - for this we need the vehicles bringing to us so this is a more local are (around 20 miles of us max) Signs and graphics - anything from office signs, pavement signs to printed banners - these are all commercial and we go to the customer. For this its a new side to the business and Id say wed look to go withing 50 miles of our base. My dilemma is, firstly when pushing social media etc we have a real divide for who we target as we have the home owers and business owners on one hand and then car enthusiasts on the other. Also from an SEO point of view theres the local vs nationwide aspect. A few people I have spoken to have said trying to target local for some services and national for others may be a little problematic. I have some people saying have all services under one domain as the links back to the site and content will all help the site to rank better. This sounds logical to me. But then Ive had other people saying split the site into 2/3 sites. Definitely split the automotive which is local from the other national areas as these are also going to be a different audience 9car enthusiasts vs home/business owners). It will mean doing two lots of SEO but the sites will be more focused on the target audience and we can have one tagret local search and the other national. This too seems very logical. My gut feeling is that both options are sort of right but doesn anyone have any advice that could help me figure this out. Also to make things a little more complicated we have an ecommerce side were we supply goods direct to the public. Woudl I be better to have a fresh domain which is simply an ecommerce platform or have a seperate shop section on my main domain were people can go to buy the products if they dont want us to fit them?
Local SEO | | paulfoz16091 -
Should I Split Into Two Websites?
I'm creating a website for a new company that offers several related services. They want to have a main corporate website that has pages for all their services. However, they want to have a second website that only features a subset of those services. So they would have the same company name, same website template, but the smaller site would have a different domain name, different text/photos on the home page and be missing some pages from the main corporate site so that site would make them look more specialized. They would have separate marketing materials (brochures, business cards) that would have the website address and email address using the different domain name. They also want the smaller second site to come up on search results related to the services for that site and not the main site. Can this be pulled off without having a significant negative effect on ranking potential for either of the two site and also not risk a duplicate content penalty? It would seem you would have to add a robots.txt file that excludes indexing of the pages on the main site that are duplicating on the smaller site. However there is a potential big issue. The company is a local business. Nowadays the local results (Map + 3-pack) are as important if not more important, than the traditional organic results below the 3-pack (although I acknowledge they are related). For their Google Business Places, since they have two websites for the same company, they can only list one of the website. So if they list the corporate site, their not going to get in the local 3-pack for their specialized site for search terms. They may be able to live with this though since the main site will show ALL services. Comments? Ideas? Issues? Strategies?
Local SEO | | DJ10270 -
If I kill off the franchisee websites and create a corp SEO monster...will my Company's SEO suffer? Pros and Cons?
Our 25 franchisees sell one product of our 7 within the Corporate porfolio. We getting ready to release a brand new corp website employing all the best possible SEO practices. Since the franchisee's barely maintain their 3-page website...we are thinking of killing them off. We will create some market pages on the Corp side and continue to use HubSpot to pass along leads to the individual franchisees. Corporate has robust Content Marketing strategy in place. Any suggestions? Cases studies?
Local SEO | | Joseph.Lusso0 -
Duplicate content on multiple domains
Dear all, I have bought 30 geo top level domains. This is for an ecommerce project that has not launcehd yet (and isn't indexed by Google). I am now at a point where I can change/consolidate all domains as sub domains or sub folders or keep things as they are. I just worry that link building would be scattered and not focused and that it might be better to concentrate the efforts on one domain. What are your views on this? Many thanks!
Local SEO | | UpMedio_SEO
Ami0 -
Local SEO Website Structure.
Hi everyone, This might be quite a long post so please bear with me. I am currently rebuilding my website. My previous website was built by a web designer and was very basic. 5 page html site consisting of home, services, gallery, testimonials, contact pages. None of them were great - thin content, not optimised as well as could be - no h1's etc. To be fair I knew nothing about websites and didn't bother much with the site. As a new business I used it simply as a place for people to visit for more information after receiving a leaflet and never bothered much about driving traffic to the site. A few years down the line and I have realised I need the website to be working for me as opposed to alongside me. I am building it myself via wordpress as web designer didn't want to work in wordpress. I have done my keyword research and I'm working on pages as we speak. Previously my homepage - around 80% of visitors landed here for my main keyword (driveway cleaning glasgow) as it was number 6 in the organic listing. With my services page appearing directly underneath in 7 for the same keyword. I have starting building a new page for that keyword which contains (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) in the url. I have 301'd my previous services page to this url. Now for my questions...
Local SEO | | sfrediktru8
My 2nd keyword based on volume is driveway cleaning. How do I optimise for this or will the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page rank for this also as the words are contained within this page? I plan on having the same structure for the remaining services - pressure-washing-glasgow, monoblock-cleaning-glasgow etc, etc. As I am building new pages for each service with location built in, where does this leave my homepage? Should I be targeting keywords for this page? It is still my strongest page and apart from the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page which will get some help from the 301 these are all new pages so I would expect perhaps initially to lose some traffic. But as I am not ranking well for anything other than the main 2 keywords mentioned above it can only be beneficial long term when google recognises the specific pages for each service. And when I start using Adwords I will have a specific landing page for each service. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks0 -
Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam. The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites. What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer. Thanks!
Local SEO | | RedKeyDesigns0 -
Removing Sub Domain & Improving Page Performance
Hello Moz folks, This question is about my main website: www.web3.ca
Local SEO | | Web3Marketing87
(run on joomla) I just noticed a very strange occurrence - when I add ANY subdomain to the home page, it still resolves to the home page. example: test3.web3.ca Can this be bad for SEO, and is there a way to eliminate this? Second Question: Do you think there are two many outgoing links on the home page of Web3? Could reducing the number of links improve the home page's performance & rank? Thanks
Anton0