Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
-
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback.
The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is:
I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier?
Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
-
Thanks for the responses. Much appreciated!
-
Have you read SEOmoz's excellent guide to redirects? If not, look that over.
In my experience, it doesn't destroy traffic to move from a .somethingelse to a .somethingnew. I've moved from .ca to .com, vice versa, .net to .com etc.
Things to consider:
- Have a crawl of the site (crawl test is great for this, plus I use Screaming Frog to cross-reference)
- Double-check that all the URLs are redirected and working (you can use a test server for this)
- Check analytics (use the last year of data) and look at all the URLs that received even one visit, and make sure they're reflected in the data from the previous two points.
- Sign up both URLs in Webmaster Tools and indicate the change there when it happens. I'd recommend parking the new .com domain on the old .net domain for a bit, registering it in Webmaster Tools first, and then having the switch happen.
Let me know if that helps.
-
Hi there
Well, in theory, most if not all of the "strength" or your links will pass on to the new site if you use a 301 redirect. We've had a recent Matt Cutts video talking about this.
In order to streamline the process, I would replicate an identical site structure on your new .com site. Same /sub-folders/, same primary article names, as similar as you can make it to you .net domain, the better.
This will allow you to 301 redirect the old domain to the new one, pointing the equivalent pages and sub folders to each other - so domain.net/sub-folder/ to domain.com/sub-folder/ and domain.net/article1.html to domain.com/article1.html. This way not only are you ensuring that the user is following the same path as before, but all of the "strength" and previous links are being pointed to their new, equivalent pages.
It's such a big help if you can keep the site structure the same. Now, there may be a case for not wanting to redirect everything - thousands and thousands of 301s can slow down the .htaccess file, not to mention the time it may take. Some pages may not be worth transferring anyway if they have no link juice or are never visited by users. In this case, it's perfectly acceptable to let these return a 404 error.
If you're looking to get the URLs you want to redirect on bulk, look in your XML sitemap. Download that and extract the URLs from there and place them into Excel. Most of the time the listed pages will be the ones you want to redirect. Copy the list into another column, so you now have 2 identical lists. Then simply use the Find & Replace tool on one of the columns, changing .net to .com. You've now got all the URLs you'll want to put into your .htaccess file for redirecting.
Finally, it wouldn't hurt to contact some of the webmasters on the sites where you have your best links. If you tell them you've moved to a .com domain and only that needs changing, they can do the leg-work for you and can ensure that your new domain keeps its strength.
Hope this helps - good luck with the move!
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 authority a better metric then referring domain count?
Hi Guys, When reviewing competitors what would be a better metric - Referring domain count OR domain authority. From my understanding DA is a indication of the quality of the link profile. So if a site has a high DA this is a better metric for comparison then referring domain count. What are your thoughts on this? Cheers/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Blog.ledsupply.com VERSUS ledsupply.com/blog
Hi All- We had a security issue that started on out blog (ledsupply.com/blog) and moved into our shopping cart, so IT suggested and moved the blog to its own server. This means we had to change the URL structure. It's now blog.ledsupply.com/ instead of ledsupply.com/blog...Is there evidence or opinion on whether this will effect SEO/Traffic (assuming we set-up redirects, etc.)? I remember reading that Google suggests having your BLOG be part of your main domain and not a SUB domain, so I'm very hesitant to switch and also welcome any additional security measure suggestions we could set-up, so that we can keep the preferred domain structure. Thank you so much! -Brooke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saultienut0 -
301 vs 410 for subdirectory that was moved to a new domain, 2-years later
Hi all, I've read a lot about 301 vs 404 and 410s, but the case is pretty unique so I decided to get some feedback from you. Both websites are travel related but we had one destination as a subdirectory of the other one (two neighboring countries, where more than 90% of business was related to the 'main' destination and the rest to the 'satellite'). This was obviously bad practice and we decided to move the satellite destination to its own domain. Everything was done 2 years ago and we opted for 301s to the new domain as we had some good links pointing to satellite content. (All of the moved content is destination specific and still relevant) Few weeks back we figured out that google still shows our subdirectory when doing specific 'site:' search and looking further into it, we realized we still get traffic for satellite destination through the main website via links acquired before the move. Not a lot of hits, but they still sporadically occur. A decision was made (rather hastily) to 410 pages and see if that will make satellite subdir pages not show in google searches. So 3 weeks in, 410 errors are climbing in GWMT, but satellite subdirectory still shows in google searches. One part of the team is pushing to put back in place 301s. The other part of the team is concerned with the 'health' of the main website as those pages are not relevant for it, and want them gone . What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
How to switch brand domain and address previous use of domain
We recently acquired a new domain to replace existing as it better fits our brand. We have little/no organic value on existing domain so switching is not an issue. However the newly acquired domain was previously used in a different industry and has inbound links with significant spam scores. How can we let Google know that these links are not valid for our business and start rebuilding reputation of the domain? Disavow tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marlette0 -
What is best practice SEO approach to re structuring a website with multiple domains and associated search engine rankings for each domain?
Hello Mozzers, I'm trying to improve and establish rankings for my website which has never really been optimised. I've inherited what seems to be a mess and have a challenge for you! The website currently has 3 different www domains all pointing to the one website, two are .com domains and one is a .com.au - the business is located in Australia and the website is primarily targeting Australian traffic. In addition to this there are a number of other non www domains for the same addresses pointing to the website in the CMS which is Adobe Business Catalyst. When I check Google each of the www domains for the website has the following number of pages indexed: www.Domain1,com 5,190 pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimmyFlorida
www.Domain2.com 1,520 pages
www,Domain3.com.au 149 pages What is best practice approach from an SEO perspective to re organising this current domain structure? 1. Do I need to use the .com.au as the primary domain given that we are in this market and targeting traffic here? Thats what I have been advised and it seems to be backed up by what I have read here. 2. Do we re direct all domains to the primary .com.au domain? This is easily done in the Adobe Business Catalyst CMS however is this the same as a 301 redirect which is the best approach from an SEO perspective? 3. How do we consolidate all of the current separate domain rankings for the 3 different domains into the one domain rankings within Google to ensure improved rankings and a best practice approach? The website is currently receiving very little organic search traffic so if its simpler and faster to start again fresh rather than go through a complicated migration or re structure and you have a suggestion here please feel free to let me know your ideas! Thank you!0 -
301 many smaller domains to a new, large domain
Hi all, I have a question regarding permanently redirecting many small websites into one, large new one. During the past 9 years I have created many small websites, all focusing on hotel reservations in one specific city. This has served me beautifully in the past, but I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer a sustainable model and therefore I am in the process of creating one large, worldwide hotel reservations website. To not loose any benefit of my hard work the past 9 years, I want to permanently redirect the smaller websites to the correct section of my new website. I know that if it is only a few websites, that this strategy is perfectly acceptable, but since I am talking about 50 to 100 websites, I am not so sure and would like to have your input. Here is what I would like to do: (the domain names are not mine, just an example) Old website: londonhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/london/ Old website: berlinhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/berlin/ Old website: amsterdamhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/amsterdam/ Etc., etc. My plan is to do this for 50 to 100 websites and would like to have your thoughts on if this is an acceptable strategy or not. Just to be clear, I am talking about redirecting only my websites that are in good standing, i.e. none of the websites I am thinking about 301'ing have been penalized. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tfbpa0 -
Brand new domain with a lot of old links.
So I just bought http://penny-auctions.co/ a couple of days ago, ignore the fact it's not set up yet and generally just a mess, and something kept bugging me about why the domain authority kept showing as 25 in the SEOmoz toolbar. Now initially I'd set it up as www. and with the trailing slash so the PA was 1, however after a bit of exploration it seems that someone has been building links to the non-www version of the domain for at least a year! The site has never been owned before so I've now made the non-www version the default and have a 5 day old site with PA 35 and DA 25! SEOmoz shows PA - 45 links, 20 domains and DA - 341 links, 113 domains. Majestic Historic - 8598 links, 236 domains and Fresh - 160 links, 62 domains. Brilliant! Except they're all spamtastic. What do you think this will do for my future attempts at ranking? Should I create pages that have links to them or just 301 them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StalkerB0