About domain names
-
Hello all. I am a new member of SEOmoz and liking it so far. This is my first post to you all (my new family).
I have a client who is starting a new company. We know for sure that he needs a new domain name. The question is two part:
Part One
Should he buy (is it worth the money) a parked domain that has some age to it. For example, a 9 or 10 year old domain that is getting "0" traffic and has no PR?
Or Should he just put that same say $1000 price tag back in his wallet and spend the money on a link building campaign to his new $9.95 domain name?
Part Two
We found a domain he really likes but only the ".co" ".net" and ".biz" are available. The .com belongs to a big company that has made a simple landing page from the .com domain name (that we really want) and will probably never let it go to us. So we will always be stuck without the .com portion of the domain registrations for this domain name if we go for it.
Question: a. Will we have difficulty competing for our own name recognition since the "big company" owns the landing page (even though it is a "0" PR page?
b. Can we live on only the .co extension or would we live to regret not getting all the extensions related to our domain name?
thanks everyone! I look forward to contributing here as well.
-
Buying a aged domain name has numerous problems, not least of which is that if the domain registration information changes and then shortly after the site is up, but completely different to what it had been in the past, Google may wipe any ranking clean and consider it a new site with a new owner.
You'll still benefit from any existing inbound links, but it's worth bearing in mind.
-
Personally, I think there is certainly some value in having a domain name with some age and would lean towards investing your money in that direction. Your client certainly doesn't want to abandon getting some links to this page so I would encourage them to keep some budget open for that but if I had to recommend one over the other I think I would recommend getting the domain name with 9-10 years of history.
Good luck!
-
Part One:
If the only reason you would spend $1000 on a domain is because of its age then i think it is a bad idea. Focus on a domain name that makes sense for the company and its mission, don't make ALL your decisions in the name of SEO. If it happens to have a targeted keyword in the domain or some old backlinks, then bonus.
Part Two:
Do you have to have a .com to rank well, of course not. However a few things to think about if you go with what you are thinking in part two...
- Is this client a direct competitor of the person who owns the .com?
If so, procede with caution, especially if it is a copyrighted or trade-marked term. - Is the .com targeting the same keywords as you?
If so, then you may be hurting yourself by confusing customers and end users.
Personally, without knowing any other details on the project, i would keep looking. Find a .com domain if that is what you truly want. Keep wordsmithing different variations and utilize Google's keyword tool to give suggestions. You'll find a winner eventually.
Good luck - Kyle
- Is this client a direct competitor of the person who owns the .com?
-
I would be hesitant to buy a parked domain - what if the previous owner had gotten themselves penalized in some way? You may end up having to work harder to overcome the effects of the penalty. I would spend the money on content or linkbuilding.
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
-
Changing domain name, witch is better - brand name.com vs keyword + brand name.com?
Hi, I just made one decision and now I'm bit worried, if I did right one. I hope that you can give me feedback and advice regarding it. I'm in hookah market, so I do not have any possibilities to buy adds, so SEO is really-really important to us. I know a lot of things what has to be done to perform better, but currently I have just few really important questions. In international market the main keyword is "hookah" and everything related to that. We are small company and our brand is not that well known and do not have high volume traffic on website. Hookah in front of that we tough will give better understanding to audience about what is the page. Which domain name is better for SEO and also branding purposes? Currently we were using the first one without keyword, no we switched to the second one (just about week ago). https://hekkpipe.com https://hookahhekkpipe.com Regarding it, some really important questions: Would the longer version of domain helps us better rank with important keywords to us or not? When we will write good content, which domain is more likely shared? I'm bit afraid that first one and that we made a mistake changing the domain name. When the 1st one, then how big difference does it potentially make? Thank you
Branding | | Karel_K0 -
Domain authority vs indexed pages
Hello, There are many articles and from our personal experience we can say that you can rank a page without backlinks with high DA but we cant figure out if DA of domain help to rank as the link juice ( so the link juice going from home page thru all pages to specific page) or it will rank a page even if its not linked in any way from homepage or any other pages and even if it not linked in any way from other pages and still ranks just because of high DA, does that DA value will spread even above all indexed pages if you have lets say 100,000 pages, i mean if domain has 100 indexed pages and DA of 50 and another domain has 100,000 and DA of 100, if both pages are the same on those domains and have no backlinks to it from my understanding page on domain with 100 indexed pages and DA of 50 suppose to rank higher ? Please share what you think
Branding | | maxdelop0 -
Changing domain name and site design while recovering from penguin? Still SEO power in EMDs?
Our website recently suffered from a penguin update courtesy of some black hat techniques used by an SEO company we hired a few years ago. We are working on cleaning up and disavowing the old spammy links, but at the same time this penalty has hit us while we were working on making some major changes to our website. As a law firm we have 2 separate practice websites we are planning to merge under 1 domain to help boost our local results. Our problem is that the domain names for each practice are specific to the type of law they practice, so we will have to move both practices to a branded name domain that works for both practices. I thought since traffic was already affected because of the penguin update this might be an opportune time to change the domain name, but since I am far from an expert at SEO I'm wondering if there are variables I am unaware of that might make this decision a very bad one. Also we currently have exact match domains for our two different sites -- the way I understand it EMDs don't carry the same SEO weight they once did, but the firm is worried that losing the EMDs is going to cause a dramatic drop in traffic. If we keep the EMDs but permanently redirect them to the new site, will it maintain their SEO value? Would google consider that black hat and possibly penalize us for it in the future? Thanks for any advice or insight!!
Branding | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Wikipedia and Domain Authority?
Hi there, my company is an online publisher of Theater news and reviews. We also sell theater tickets. We presently don't have a Wikipedia page. Would creating one generally help our search rankings?
Branding | | TheaterMania0 -
Two Domains, which one should be used on Social Media platforms?
I have a client who changed from a Branded Domain (301 redirected this domain) to a Partial Match Domain, using the city in the domain for rich keyword. I take care of their Social Media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.). These social networks used the Branded Domain (with the company name in the domain) for years, now the new web designer is asking that we change Username and Domain to the new Partial Match Domain, which is very "generic" not mentioning the company name. I am reluctant to change for branding mention purposes. Does anyone have any advice?
Branding | | Artistic0 -
Using keywords instead of brand name on G+ to rank for local terms.
I noticed something this morning, when performing a search on Google UK for "Intensive driving courses southend" the first position is awarded to a driving school that is using exact match keywords instead of brand name on their G+ page to rank for local terms. See this for yourself here: https://www.google.co.uk/#q=intensive+driving+courses+southend Until then, my site had held position 1 for this term for well over a year. Every gut instinct I have tells me that this will not work forever and its not something I should implement, however I'm interested to hear if anyone else is using this tactic, and how its working for them? How can I compete with this "grey hat" tactic?
Branding | | Silkstream0 -
Merging domains will sum the authority?
Hi guys, I have two websites that are almost the same, I am working to merge them. One domain have authority 44 and other 24... After I merge I will have authority 68? Should I keep the older domain or the newer? The newer has my keyword in the URL but the older have 10 years. Thank you
Branding | | Felip30 -
Need advice on old brand names
A couple of years ago my company put all effort into one brand name, closing multiple sites with good names. All traffic going to ie OldBrandName.com is now redirected to www.newbrandname.com/OldBrandName. Here our customers are being told about the fusion/merge and we are linking to the key-products of OldBrandName, on our new age. We have 4 of these pages for 4 different brandnames. These pages still get a lot of traffic. Now to my question: how do I get as much juice as possible out of these OldBrandNames? They have high page authority and many inbound links. But I would like to pass the juice and the links to our frontpage or other relevant pages. What is optimal? Should I just redirect all the traffic to www.newbrandname.com? The redirects was made approximately 2 years ago. We are in the travel & leisure business, so customers often visits numerous times a year, closing deals 1-2 times a year. All 4 OldBrandNames have their own specialities (family, low budget, off-the-beaten-track, wellness). Any recommendations on how to approach this?
Branding | | alsvik0