Rebranding and Domain Name Changes
-
Hi All,
One of my clients wants to rebrand http://indiaretailnews.com/ so that it's clear that the site is under the operational umbrella of http://tradebriefs.com/. indiaretailnews.com has a lower domain authority of 20, but because of the domain name it ranks number #2 for the keyword "retail news" for Google India.
The client's question:
Can we change the site names to TradeBriefsRetail.com orTradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com without affecting the SEO on each site? How do we do this – redirect from TradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com to IndiaRetailNews.com and so on or simply put all the content on the new sites and get rid of the old domains or some other way? Do long domain names cause a problem?
Another option is TradeBriefsRetail.in, etc with the domain extension showing the country that the content is for.. In a year or two, we will be expanding to markets outside India.
My opinion:
Keep the old domains and redirect to something like http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news
Or perhaps a subdomain:
http://indiaretailnews.tradebriefs.com
In the short term, I'd imagine rankings will drop, but if we wanted to consolidate domain authority, I was thinking that http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news would be the best bet.
Thoughts?
Kenji
-
Thanks for the resource. Much appreciated!
-
Yes, it is. I thought you were going to redirect the whole site to a single sub dir.
If you want a really good tutorial, this Best Practice on SEOmoz is really thorough.
I am pretty sure when I looked you were on a LAMP stack with the sites so should not present any probs.
Best -
Thanks Robert! This helps.
If we were going to go the URL to URL route, would there be any reason not to redirect to a subdirectory?
For example: http://indiaretailnews.com/index.php/best-practices/industry
Would be 301'd to
http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news/best-practices/industry
Wouldn't this be a good way to consolidate?
-
In the total and in the beginning, you will affect the SEO with the change, but the question becomes how much.
Another consideration is brand equity and whether you would lose any. If, the only reason for changing is to show that one is under the umbrella of the other, I am not sure of that as a good strategy. Why not just put something on the site that makes that clear?If however, you are having dupe content issues, want to consolidate staff, want to try and boost one site, etc. then you can 301 A to B. With the tradebriefs having higher authority, I would do as you suggest doing and go to it. So, indiaretail 301's each url to the appropriate url on tradebriefs. Not 301 indiaretail.com to trade briefs.com.
The last two with subdomain and sub directory is not the way to go IMO. The subdomain is its own domain and does not share linking, etc. With the way you are showing a single sub directory, that would kill a ton on your site and you would waste a lot of your linking.
The 301 url to url is the way to go.
Hope that helps,
Robert
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
-
Can Robots.txt on Root Domain override a Robots.txt on a Sub Domain?
We currently have beta sites on sub-domains of our own domain. We have had issues where people forget to change the Robots.txt and these non-relevant beta sites get indexed by search engines (nightmare). We are going to move all of these beta sites to a new domain that we disallow all in the root of the domain. If we put fully configured Robots.txt on these sub-domains (that are ready to go live and open for crawling by the search engines) is there a way for the Robots.txt in the root domain to override the Robots.txt in these sub-domains? Apologies if this is unclear. I know we can handle this relatively easy by changing the Robots.txt in the sub-domain on going live but due to a few instances where people have forgotten I want to reduce the chance of human error! Cheers, Dave.
On-Page Optimization | | davelane.verve0 -
Multiple keywords over multiple domains - am I missing the point?
This I think, is a conceptual question related to Moz/ KeywordTracking in general. Q: What is a "good" way to setup tracking for keywords across many pages, potentially multiple domains? At present I've identified some keywords that are relevant to our products. That leads me to want to track not just for a specific page, but for their rankings across multiple pages, and potentially at least two domains. One site is our main product site, the other a blog/info site. This is I suppose mostly discovery at this point. Working out what, if any, of our pages are ranking for a full set of keywords that we believe are related to our products. It may be that I'm completely missing the point of tracking, that I'm not using it as intended. I want to learn how our pages track currently (for a bunch of keywords), see that change over time as we make changes, and also visualise what we're strong in and what we're not. To me, this would let me see just where the holes are in our SEO easily. The reason I ask is that it seems I have to manually enter a keyword plus a webpage in Moz. Given I've 20-30 keywords I want to track many pages, this is going to take me "quite some time" (tm). Is there a better way to do what I describe here? Am I missing the point of keyword tracking?
On-Page Optimization | | shinywhitebox0 -
Should a company worry about how many domains it maps to the same home page?
I seem to be at logger heads with developers regarding domain mapping. The scenario: I have a company with one site on a primary domain name, but all the other domains they own are mapped using a tool provided by their hosting vendor. But. what I see is a keyword loaded domain that shows it has been 'mapped' to the primary domain, but you can type into the browser this keyword loaded domain and it will serve up in your browser that same home page you see on the PRIMARY DOMAIN. So, picture this - you are looking at the home page on wwww.keyworddomain.com and see the same home page as www.primarycompanydomain.com - but if you select anything from the menu at www.keyworddomain.com you will be taken immediately to www.primarycompanydomain.com/page-you-selected I just get a feeling this is not right as I can search Google for www.keyworddomain.com and Google lists the site home page on that domain. But when I click through from the listed result, I am taken to www.primarycompanydomain.com which is ideally where I want to be and I would want Google to focus on this domain, and I have told it to do so within the feature included within Google Webmaster Tools. The developers say there is nothing wrong. There argument - why would a hosting company provide this domain mapping feature if it was not best practice. My argument - but Google is listing that domain URL (www.keyworddomain.com) despite the fact it takes me through to www.primarycompanydomain.com - will Google not think this strange despite me telling it via GWMT that www.primarycompanydomain.com is the one and only domain I am working on. Tell me if I am going mad or not, and who is right and who is wrong. Appreciate all your answers.
On-Page Optimization | | ICTADVIS0 -
Is .PW domain is good for SEO?
I want to register .PW domain which has recently got live to register. I am in doubt should it is good for SEO or not.
On-Page Optimization | | semmediapvtltd0 -
Static content VS Dynamic changing content
We have collected a lot of reviews and we want to use them on our Categories pages. We are going to be updating the top 6 reviews per categories every 4 days. There will be another page to see all of the reviews. Is there any advantage to have the reviews static for 1 or 2 weeks vs. having unique new ones pulled from the data base every time the page is refreshed? We know there is an advantage if we keep them on the page forever with long tail; however, we have created a new page with all of the reviews they can go to.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Multiple domains vs single domain vs subdomains ?
I have a client that recently read an article that advised him to break up his website into various URL's that targeted specific products. It was supposed to be a solution to gain footing in an already competitive industry. So rather than company.com with various pages targeting his products, he'd end up having multiple smaller sites: companyClothing.com companyShoes.com Etc. The article stated that by structuring your website this way, you were more likely to gain ranking in Google by targeting these niche markets. I wanted to know if this article was based on any facts. Are there any benefits to creating a new website that targets a specific niche market versus as a section of pages on a main website? I then began looking into structuring each of these product areas into subdomains, but the data out there is not definitive as to how subdomains are viewed by Google and other search engines - more specifically how subdomains benefit (or not!) the primary domain. So, in general, when a business targets many products and services that cover a wide range - what is the best way to structure the delivery of this info: multiple domains, single domain with folders/categories, or subdomains? If single domain with folders/categories are not an option, how do subdomains stack up? Thanks in advance for your help/suggestions!
On-Page Optimization | | dgalassi0 -
Google's Page Layout Algorithm Change
Hello Everyone, Google says they've implemented this change because they are answering the complaints of users who have to search for actual content after they've clicked on a result. They go on to say users want to see content right away. Now while most of this talk is about ads, I wonder if this will also apply to websites that are image and flash heavy above the fold with very little content. I am working on a few auto dealer sites where 99% of the content above the fold are flash banners and images. Below all of this noise you can find about 200 words of text talking about their dealerships. I'd love to know everyone's thoughts on this...Does the new page layout algorithm change apply to only ads or to images and flash as well? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | wparlaman0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0