Domain Issue
-
Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust.
I have a few questions....
-Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy?
Any guidelines on how to value domains?
If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info?
Any other suggestions are welcome.
Thanks.
-
Domaining is a huge industry in itself, but yes, there are some good ones out there. dnforum.com and namepros.com have been two sites that interest me a lot.
General guidelines- .com's are by far worth the most based on supply/demand, especially anything with a single dictionary word or 2-4 letters (less always better, no numbers always better). Other TLD's can be worth something, but seem to see much less consensus on their value. Even the above- it does vary. Sometimes you see a fish.com sell for $1 mil. I've seen other dictionary words go for south of $5k (although that's been a little while).
At the end of the day, I would only consider what it's worth to you though. I personally don't think that .com's will ever go anywhere, but the Internet is fast-paced, and there are no guarantees. There are some pros out there that are buying some pretty fancy boats off of buying and selling, but they do it in large volumes, and play the numbers. Personally, I ran a hosting company for 7 years, and had to resist a whole lot of temptation to buy up domains based on the enormous wealth of data of data on other webmasters kept in good faith that I had at my fingertips.
After leaving to start my own inbound marketing agency, I bought the domain of my last name (northcutt.com) for more than you've suggested, but there were real reasons (most of all, that I was left with little else than my personal brand to side-step into a totally different industry, and I had the chance to do it). But that price was built into my startup budget. Whatever you go with, I'd just make sure it's something you're happy with typing thousands of times, and explaining to people how to access. A lot. Anything short and memorable can also work well, and I wouldn't worry too much about weird TLD's for SEO anymore. Personally, I'm a big fan of .io domains as well.
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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
SEO Indexing issues
Hi, We have been submitting sitemaps on a weekly basis for couple of months now and only 40% of the submitted pages are indexed each time. Whether on the design , content or technical side, the website doesn't violate google guidelines.Can someone help me find the issue? website: http://goo.gl/QN5CevThanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZeFan0 -
A new website issue
Hello everybody,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtmaster
I have started a new website 22 days ago at the beginning of this month and i have long articles. I think this should make the site appear in search results for long tail keywords even if they are not very relevant but as you can see in the attached image from my webmaster tools the impression count has suddenly increased to 100 then significantly decreased again. Even when i cancel "filter" option. Is this normal for a 3 weeks old website? or there is something i have to check? thanks. cLMa04l.jpg0 -
Tips to Merge Two Domains?
Hi all, my client assigned me to merge both their two domains. To cut the long story, at the moment they have, for example, domain1.com and domain2.com. Practically, they sell quite the same products but with different content and layout. This has been happening for several years: domain1.com came first then domain2.com a couple of months after. They noticed that domain2.com has now more traffic than domain1.com. Another reason is they want to use one placeholder to avoid brand confusion (as expected because the products are actually the same). So, they are planning to merge the brand into domain2.com. I think this is just the same as moving domain, isn't it? I have been preparing all things as per SEOmoz SEO Guide: How to Properly Move Domains and Google's moving your site . Do you have any other tips to include? I want to make sure that the domain moving will be successful and the link juice on domain1.com can be transferred to domain2.com . Many thanks for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ci3reR0 -
Change of domain procedure
Hi Guys, I have been tasked with conducting a change of domain for our company website. The website will be exactly the same, just change from www.jamesburfield.co.uk to www.burfieldcreative.co.uk. This was attempted before but my boss got cold feet and switched back after he saw a drop in rankings. (He put in the redirects and went through the change of domain procedure with google). I have told him that I think its possible with minimal disruption and we have agreed even with some disruption it will better in the long run for the company. Here is the process I intend to follow: 1. Copy and upload site to new domain 2. Redirect all pages with a wildcard or individually - possibly drop the www also 3. Follow the change of domain procedure in webmaster tools 4. Change the href of as many as possible back links to point at the new domain Please let me know your thoughts on my plan and if there is anything else I can do to ensure we maintain our rankings. Any help is appreciated as this is my suggestion and my neck is on the line! Thanks guys! Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpsonGareth0 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Confusion about domain extension.
Hi, need bit suggestions from you guys. After researchi found a KW that have some good Lcoal search volume.. My question is should i buy the CLD as it has good LS volume or i should go for .com , .net etc. Becasue as i know that LS means that number of people searching form that location(based on IP) not number of people searching in that local version of google. So no need to go for CLD as it vl help only in local version.. Bit confused waiting for reply thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Big_Zee0 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2