Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
-
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name.
The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible.
Thanks!
Eric
-
Thanks, that most recent answer helped and confirmed our suspicions. There is in fact a different website for each domain. We will leave the old site in place for the time being and just link folks to the new one from there. Thanks again and sorry about any confusion.
-
Ok, in a way you are saying you have two different website one is the old one and one is the new one… or both domains open up a single website? If both websites are different then I would advise you to play safe and do not redirect instantly because redirection can cause a dip in conversions…
In that case you should focus on building links for new domain and rank it on keywords where your old keywords are located and then redirect if you want…
If this is two domains open up one website only, then isn’t it redirect already?
Still a little confusing but I am trying to answer!
-
Sorry for any confusion. The new domain (knackhq.com) is the one that doesn't rank as well. The old one (appnowgo.com) does rank pretty well for many of our keywords. This is why we are still getting 60%+ of our converts through that site. So, while I know we will have to 301 that domain eventually, we are apprehensive about doing it now if we stand to loose a large amount of that convertible traffic. We are still focusing efforts on the knackhq.com domain but just want to know if we should wait until that domain ranks better before redirecting the old domain, or just switch now.
-
Now this is confusing again... you said your old domain is not ranking or any phrases....if this is the case then redirecting 301 to new domain is the option and you will not see any dip in traffic or conversions...
but if you are saying that your old domain is ranking then the strategy will be different.
-
We are getting about 60% of our converted traffic by way of the old domain. How much dropoff should we expect when we do the redirect. I'm assuming that all of the result pages for the old domain will just go away instead of adapt to the new domain, right?
-
Check the back link profile of your Old domain at step one if it is fine and no junk link is there in the link profile... then go ahead and redirect it 301 to the new URL... It’s always good to get link juice that you are wasting anyways...
But if there is a lot of junk in the link profile of the old URL i will consider dropping that and go for the new URL as a standalone property...
In both the cases your future link building and SEO efforts should be on the new domain.
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 a whole subdomain to main domain
Hello, we have our website in two languages. The subdomain cs. for czech and main domain for english. Somehow this has caused google not to rank our main domain in local CZ SERP for many english keywords and we have not found out a reason other than it might think of them as duplicates or that we at the start had put targeting for the cs. domain to CZECH. (Its been 4 months, english keywords in Czech serp are easier and still it ranks them on the very last place, yet for example.com ranks them in google.com co.uk, fr etc in top 10) We will close our cs.example.com subdomain and use only example.com hoping this will not cause google to display only one domain and raise it in CZECH rankings. **Can i 301 redirect cs.example.com to example.com and all the categories of cs.example.com to relevant english categories. This should be ok? **
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Maintaining Link Value Of Old URLS With 301 Redirects
Large ecommerce site that has been around for a long time (15+ years.) During that time technology has changed a lot and we are running into issues maintaining 301 redirects for very old urls. For example we have a good amount of links to product and category pages. Some of the old links are to products that still exist and will exist for many years to come.(of note little to no traffic comes via these links. Most of them are close to 9 years old so they are buried deep within articles, forums, or websites) However as we make changes to the site and URL structure these old urls are taking up more resources to continue to maintain 301 redirects. I am Leary of no longer supporting them because I do not want it to impact rankings however there is concern on how much development time and technology resources it takes to continue to support as time goes on. Does anyone have experience handling redirects 3 or 4 url structures old? Looking for insight from someone who has crossed this bridge before.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
Why does my 301 show the old urls with new descriptions and titles?
Hi all, We've just rebranded. The 301 appears to have worked well and moved the results and rankings onto the new domain. However a site:olddomain.com search in Google brings up about a hundred pages that have the new titles and descriptions but show the old urls - does anyone have any idea how to make the old domain disappear from the SERPS? Many thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | panini0 -
Site Penalized - 301 Redirect Question
Hello, We have a website that was penalized roughly two years by Google for "Unnatural Links"... We are experiencing a lot of problems with this site, completely unrelated to the penalty or SERPS, and we're debating doing a 301 Re-direct to another site we own that is totally clean and has no "Unnatural Links". If we do a 301 from the penalized site to our alternative website, will there be any cross-contamination? Will the penalty carry over to our other site? Please let me know what you guys think. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Redirecting Domain will cause SEO?
I am redirecting my domain, based on Geo Location. For example : if someone browse from india www.example.com they will redirect to www.example.in Does redirecting domain on Geo based will cause SEO or Any kind of duplicate content issue, as i am using same content on both TLDs.
Technical SEO | | anishtapan0 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0