Impact of moving all the domain from .net to .com
-
Hi,
We are thinking of moving a domain from a .net extension to a .com because of internal political reason.
It's a french website with 3 000 pages.The organic trafic is 65 % from France and 35 % from Canada. We have decent rankings and we have around 150 000 organic visits/month.
For sure,if we move the site, we will do all the rigth 301 redirect. We will also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the new location of the site.
But even if we do all the best practices. What would be the impact of changing the extension.
Is anyone had some experience with this ? I will really like to have your opinion on this.
Thanks
Rick
-
changing from .com to .net is the same as changing your domain name. It should be done only when absolutely necessary, unless the current site is not established and not ranking.
-
Thanks Rick
Really appreciate that you share your experience !
-
I would move just to get off of the .net.
-
Hola,
We've moved a number of sites for similar political reasons. It's always frustrating as an SEO!
We almost always have seen some drop-off for obvious reasons. Sometimes that drop-off has been less 5%, other times closer to 30% depending on the precautions that business owners were willing to take. Sounds like you're going to do redirects and do the webmaster tools request. 2 tips:
- Plan to hold on to the .net domain for a long time and keep the redirects in place. Our worst results were situations where for some reason, the business owner would not (refused to/could not/whatever reason) hold on to the old domain name.
- Try to find a feasible/scalble way to get your top-linkers to move to the new domain. In a perfect world, you'd get most your inbound links updated. This can take some time but seems to help minimize the impact and be better in the long-run. This is an absolute waste of times in some cases (way too inefficient) but if you have or can establish solid relationships, get those links updated!
Best of luck. It's not an ideal situation but usually isn't the end of the world if you're in it for the long haul (unless your in a crazy competitive market)!
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 Change
What is the average organic traffic loss one can expect after switching to a new domain? We went from .com to .org and are seeing 50% decline in organic traffic and 25% in Google news traffic. 301s were implemented from site.com/some-page to site.org/some-page and change site was completed in WMT. This traffic drop seems excessive...
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Moving a blog from Blogger
A client just setup word press. They have a ton of content on their blogger account. Today they stated they were moving the content to their blog. My knee jerk response is to leave it where it is. I am posting this question to re affirm my position. Unless there are some pro's to moving this over.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
301 Redirect with ASP (not .NET)
I'm looking to redirect non www to www and also .co.uk to .com. http://www.xxxxx.com is the intended target. http://xxxxx.com & http://www.xxxxx.co.uk & http://xxxxx.co.uk to redirect. I managed to do some of this but if I come through to a service page /services/cars.asp it redirects to the homepage. All I have so far is this code: <% If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 ThenResponse.write "http://www." & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST") & Request.ServerVariables("URL") & "?" & Request.ServerVariables("QUERY_STRING")Response.EndEnd if %> What am I missing?
Technical SEO | | Hughescov0 -
How to move many domains form an address to another?
We need to move a site from a domain to another one, and there are also hundreds or even thousands of subdomains to move. What would be the best practise to do it in order to save at least some of the visibility in search results?
Technical SEO | | Tulos0 -
Domain redirection and seo implications
We have an existing site that is a subdomain but we recently acquired an exact match domain. Will building links to the exact match domain and having the domain point at our existing subdomain work or should we convert the entire site and redirect our existing subdomain to the new domain? What I'm trying to figure out is how to maximize the benefit here and how the existing mass of links pointing to our existing subdomain (shop.domain.com) can be used. New domain: keywordshop.com Existing URL: shop.domain.com
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
TLD domain rediversion
Hello, I have got a .co.uk version of my domain which is parked with godaddy and I want to divert it to the .com version which is the live site. At the moment the .co.uk version is showing a godaddy landing page. My setup is: Godaddy as domain registrar, domain.com host separate hosting company. I looked into godaddy panel and I guess I have two options. (which I have done as a quick fix), I have done the diversion within godaddy panel to the .com version. It simply asked for which domain I wanted to forward the .co.uk to, and I have entered the .com version. I can create the .co.uk domain within my shared hosting and repoint to the .com within the hosting company DNS settings, and have godaddy simply point to the hosting company nameservers instead. Are the two solutions above equivalent or is one better than others ? Esp. from an SEO point of view? If someone has technical expertise to explain, this would be great. I think it would also help other companies in the same situation. Thanks ! 🙂
Technical SEO | | dpaq20110 -
Two spelling of a domain
I have a customer with two spellings of their domain name. I set up an account for spelling A and forwarded all the email boxes to spelling B becuase people tend to remember spelling A more of the time. Spelling B is the real web site. I also want any www. traffic for spelling A to go to spelling B so I used this .htaccess file in the root of spelling A Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | freestone
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.B.com/$1 [R=301,L] I use to just forward A to B from the registrar but made this change to allow for email spelled either way. My question is does this create a duplicate site issue for the bots? Is this in anyway an SEO negative and if so is there a better way to do this. Thanks jw0