.co.uk to .com - Transfer of domain
-
After having our site up for over a year and gaining PR 3 and more than a dozen page 1 rankings on Google for most of our competitive terms, we have realised we have to transfer to .com from our current .co.uk URL for legal reasons.
What would the best way be to carry out such a move in an SEO perspective?
-
Mmm... it is not the webmaster that does the 301... it is your server that does it.
I mean:
- the inbound link send to your old url page
- search engines bot (and users) follow that link and arrive to your site
- your server sees that a visit is directed to the old url
- the server then apply the rule you gave him via .htaccess (for instance) and redirect the visit to the new url of the page
In this "transfer" a little bit of pagerank seems getting lost, that is why is alway better to ask to the owner of the site where the backlink is to update the link itself, if possible.
-
How can we 301 the inbound links to our site, if the links are from other sites ? Supposing, the webmaster has placed our link oh his site. Should we ask the webmaster of the site to do this as he has the ftp details only.
-
Read this Google webmaster help: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en
That page explains very easily what to do, but you can sum it with
- 301 old urls to new site urls;
- control the inbound links and eventually ask to change the URL in the link to the new page. If not possible, the 301 will redirect the visits from that link to the new page, but will loose a little bit of PR;
- use the Webmaster Tools > Change of address function to alert Google of the change of address;
- Add the new site in Google Webmaster Tool
- Notify Google with a sitemap of the new site
There will be a period where Google will crawl both the old and the new site... but I believe that you will have to block Google from indexing the old one due to the legal issue you told. That can be done via robots.txt and noindex, nofollow in the meta robots
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 Name redirection to new Domain Name - VS - Transfering Domaine Name from account 1 to account 2
Hi there! Thanks for your time 😉 I have a new cutsomer that bought his domain name via WIX and your know... WIX sucks huge time for SEO. Basically, we want to do SEO outside of WIX. But I am not sure HOW I should proceed. I think I have 2 options: OPTION 1- We transfer the domain name from WIX to a new hoster. But we will lose 7 days during that, lose prospects while the website is in maintenance and we might lose the little bit of ranking we have on the way. BUT! ONCE Everything is done with the transfer, we will be able to operate our SEO campaing with a Domain Name that as 15 domain authority, links, little bit a ranking, etc. OPTION 2- I just buy a new domain name. I build the new Website on it and then use the SEO juice from the old domain name with redirect to push the new domain name. Like this, I won't lose any opportunities. BUT I will have to restart the SEO as new... Any tips or ideas for me? Maybe there is an OPTION 3 that I don't know about.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-SEO1 -
Http & https domain names
We currently have a site which we found SEM Rush to show that their were duplicate pages for the site. Upon further inspection we realized this was because there existed both http:// and https:// Versions of the site. Is this a problem for Google that the site appears for both http:// and https:// and that there are therefore duplicate versions of the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Domain Factors
Now that Page Rank seems to have been 'put out to graze' by Google with no further PR update planned, what would you say is the 'main factor' when looking at a domain? Is it Moz DA? or Moz Links? or Majestic TrustFlow? Or none of the above or is it a combination of the above?! Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
PhoneSale.com - technical SEO analysis
We own and operate a site called: http://www.phonesale.com/ For the past 5-6 months, we have been working to recover our organic traffic which was hit heavily May 2012. We have made many strides in terms of eliminating technical issues w/ the site as well as cleaning up our link profile to no avail. Is there anything else that we can do to help get back into Google's good graces, both on page and off page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Are sub domains considered completely different than the root domain?
We have a project that is going to generate duplicate content. If we move the new content to a sub-domain (E.g. product.domain.com) will it still be considered duplicate content to the root domain? Or is it like having two completely different domains? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tripled5110 -
Is my other domain making me not rank?
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
If we add noindex to a subdomain, will the traffic to that subdomain still generate domain authority for the primary domain?
We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0 -
Sub-domains and different languages
Hi there! All our content is in two languages: English and Spanish, but they're basically the same (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter). We have the English content under a subdomain (en.mydomain.com) and the Spanish one under another subdomain (es.mydomain.com). First of all: is that correct? Is it better to have it under folders or under subdomains? But the most important question. When a user enters to mydomain.com is redirected through a 302 to the Spanish subdomain or to the English subdomain, depending on the language of his browser (microsoft.com works this way). We have now a lot of links pointing to mydomain.com but... where is all this link flow going?? Are we losing it? Should we have a landing page under mydomain.com pointing to both subdomains? or maybe redirect it through a 301 to just one of the subdomains, then redirect the user to his language if necessary? Thank you very much!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0