Building new site on new web host with concerns
-
Hello,
I have a domain with GoDaddy and current site is hosted there as well. I want to leave my domain with GoDaddy and build a brand new site on HostGator.
The current website was designed to get us started. Not any significant traffic, backlinks, or SEO. The domain is not really what I want. There are 80 pages including those that are no longer in service. The keywords are not as relevant today. Current site domain is whiterocktech.net
The new site will be very much different with SEO leading the way. We have designed it yet have not opened an account yet with HostGator. In addition, we have found a shorter more appropriate domain name. Not ideal but easy to type in yet it has a dash. This site is wr-crm.com.
Questions:
Does it make sense to "cut bait" from the current site given the lack use?
Does it make sense to build the site and still set redirects from the old domain pages to a new one?
Given so little traffic, is there really an effect on SEO if we sunset the old domain?
Could I strip out the old domain website and just post a message on one page to come to our new site until old domain expires?
I appreciate any insights on helping me with this decision.
Mike
-
In the age of people rarely actually typing domains directly, rather opting to type a brand name or part of the domain and letting Google et al. do the work, I'm not sure there is much issue having a dash. I'd certainly rather have the shorter domain with a dash than a longer one without.
-
Thanks, Alex. I appreciate you validating my hunches so that helps me with my decision. I can redirect quickly and keep the continuity.
To your point about the blog, the new site is blog and testimonial centric; big part of the new front. I think the plan we have will truly lift us up quickly.
Last thought/question - I've researched a lot on a domain with a dash. Varying thoughts both ways - do it and don't do it. I like the shortness and the domain.com rather the net. Any opinions on this?
Thanks again. Helps to have some chops to lean on here.
MM
-
Short answer, given the small amount of work to 301 everything, I'd go for it.
Slightly longer answers:
Does it make sense to "cut bait" from the current site given the lack use?
I wouldn't, I don't see any benefit to doing that. Your site does rank for some keywords and phrases (Not spectacularly, but it does rank none the less), so why chuck that way? 301 the pages to the new domain and host the content there. As a side note, maybe look at url structure for the blog posts at the same time, you might see an uplift in ranking.
Does it make sense to build the site and still set redirects from the old domain pages to a new one?
Yes, as above.
Given so little traffic, is there really an effect on SEO if we sunset the old domain?
Google, in my experience, seems to take a while to "forget" about old sites, even if they are 404ing. Your old content will, for a while, compete with your new site.
Could I strip out the old domain website and just post a message on one page to come to our new site until old domain expires?
Yes, but Google wouldn't understand that.
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
-
We are migrating a site and are seeing alot of 301s and 302s already in the old site is it ok to leave those as is?
For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Site verification in WMT
Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Would you advise or not to include a sites name at the end of each title tage? Example "Top 3 things to do in New York | yoursite.com"
Having a discussion on if we should include our domain at the end of each site page. Re read over the following pages and question remove the brand to keep under 70 characters? or Shorten the page Title before the brand? Let the title exceed 70 characters? What is your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Harley2g0 -
No inbound links. Should I link-build or create new content?
I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above0 -
Penalities in a brand new site, Sandbox Time or rather a problem of the site?
Hi guys, 4 weeks ago we launched a site www.adsl-test.it. We just make some article marketing and developed a lots of functionalities to test and share the result of the speed tests runned throug the site. We have been for weeks in 9th google serp page then suddendly for a day (the 29 of february) in the second page next day the website home is disappeared even to brand search like adsl-test. The actual situalion is: it looks like we are not banned (site:www.adsl-test.it is still listed) GWT doesn't show any suggestion and everything looks good for it we are quite high on bing.it and yahoo.it (4th place in the first page) for adsl test search Anybody could help us to understand? Another think that I thought is that we create a single ID for each test that we are running and these test are indexed by google Ex: <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/w08ZMPKl3R or</cite> <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/P87t7Z7cd9</cite> Actually the content of these urls are quite different (because the speed measured is different) but, being a badge the other contents in the page are pretty the same. Could be a possible reason? I mean google just think we are creating duplicate content also if they are not effectively duplicated content but just the result of a speed test?
Technical SEO | | codicemigrazione0 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0