301'ing away from an exact match domain.
-
Hi Moz Community!
My website gets just over 50% of its traffic from ranking in the top 3 in over 10 countries for my exact match keyword domain. 80% + from keywords related to the exact match domain.
We are now looking at doing a to 301 re-direct to a new domain to start a fresh branding to the site to increase scope and expand. This would involve removing the keyword from the homepage and domain entirely . However. Considering all competitors ranking for our main keyword, have the keyword in their domain as either a subdomain to or in their root domain and in their homepage content, would this make ranking without the keyword in domain & content hard? I have found a very similar example that has done so, so I guess the answer to that question is no its not.
about 65-70% of our anchor text on our backlinks is for our domain keyword.
Can anyone advise how best to go about maintaining rankings after 301ing or how best to go about 301ing to make sure that we can maintain the rankings for our main keyword!
Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks.
-
Re-branding is great and 301ing from existing domain to the new one is also a good idea for this but always remember whenever you do a 301 from one domain to another domain there is always a small loss of link juice which might cause a fluctuation for few or many of your ranking position in Google.
In my opinion the idea is not bad but tries to plan a strategy that aloe you to gain some quick and high quality link in that case so that it can minimize the ranking loss due to 301redirection.
**do not go for subdomain
**As far as not using a keyword in the new domain..I would always recommend you to do some competitor analysis for this and do not remove the keyword from the domain if most of the competitors are sung it as I still have an observation that Google give less (but still a value) to domain that contain keyword in it!
Hope this helps!
-
I recommend to do two things. 1st follow your business objectives. If you really don't have any, then try writing it out. 2nd, and equally as important, optimize for your audience, not for Google. When I hear newbies talk about putting KWs in h1 tags and domains, they are thinking the wrong way. Don't be like me. I wasted time trying to optimize my website so much that it was over-optimized and unreadable.
I stand by my statement, KW in subdomains do not give a boost. If it did, all of us on MOZ would have done that years ago. It would have also created a lot of spam sites.
Do you have any comment on removing the keyword from the homepage content?
I don't know what your GA says. That's your call. If the keyword is not as relevant, then no. All the sites I have ever built had a home page that was about all the landing pages. Go to my site and study it (the shipping one).
-
Thanks for your response Francisco,
Do you have any comment on removing the keyword from the homepage content?
Also, I highly doubt that its an over 8 million exact search keyword. One or two competitors I would probably side with your argument, but everyone on the top page can't be wrong.
We would be 301'ing from domain.com to domain.com, not to a subdomain. That was just reference to the competitors on first page serps.
-
Sub domains do not give a ranking boost. While I was a subscriber at SEObook, Aaron Wall put it like this:
creditcards.com = boost
creditcards.example.com = crap
cardscredit.com = crap
Don't worry about KW in the domain. If you can't rank any other way than to rely on the KW being in your domain, you don't deserve to rank. If I were your competitor, then all I would need to do is get some real FB URL Likes and a couple okay external links.
If you are going to 301, make sure you have your .htaccess ready to go ahead of time. Also re-submit your old sitemap in GWT 1st so it crawls your site and notices the 301s. Then submit your new sitemap.
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
-
What does it mean to build a 'good' website.
Hi guys. I've heard a lot of SEO professionals, Google, (and Rand in a couple of whiteboard Friday's) say it's really important to build a 'good' website if you want to rank well. What does this mean in more practical terms? (Context... I've found some sites rank much better than they 'should' do based on the competition. However, when I built my own site (well-optimised (on-page) based on thorough keyword research) it was nowhere to be found (not even top 50 after I'd 'matched' the backlink profile of others on page 1). I can only put this down to there being 'good quality website' signals lacking in the latter example. I'm not a web developer so the website was the pretty basic WordPress site.)
Algorithm Updates | | isaac6630 -
Is Having Content 'Above The Fold' Still Relevant for Website Design and SEO
Hey there, So I have a client who recently 're-skinned' their website and now there is little to no content above the fold. Likewise, I've noticed that since the transition to this new front-end design there has been a drop in rankings for a number of keywords related to one of the topics we are targeting. Is there any correlation here? Is having content 'above the fold' still a relevant factor in determining a websites' searchability? I appreciate you reading and look forward to hearing from all of you. Have a great day!
Algorithm Updates | | maxcarnage0 -
Your search - site:domain.com - did not match any documents.
I've recently started work on a new clients website and done some preliminary work with on-page optimisation, and there is still plenty of work to be done and issues to resolve. They are ranking ok on Bing, but they are not getting any ranking on Google at all (except paid) - I tried the site:domain.com search and comes up with no results... so this confirms that something is going on with the google search rank! Can anyone shed light on what can cause this or why this would happen? My next step is to look at their webmaster tools (haven't had access yet), but if anyone has any tips to resolve this or where to look, that would be great! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | ElevateCreativeAU0 -
Which domain is better - a Long descriptive or Short Abbreviated?
I want to start a new company and have an option to have a long and descriptive domain or buy out the 5 letter Abbreviated domain for $2000. abstract example:
Algorithm Updates | | NikitaG
LegalMigrationServiceCapeTown.com
V.S.
LMSCT.com The advantage of the shorter domain is that it is 13 years old.
so now for the SEO - which one do you think is better? is Exact Match Domain a better thing for SEO or can I get away with a shorter domain? I can buy both, but which one should I build on as the main domain? any advice would be much appreciated, as well as the PROS & CONS of both.0 -
How much does a keyword focused domain matter today?
Is it still better to choose a keyword focused domain lets say over a branded domain in today's world? How much of a part does that have in the grand scheme of things?
Algorithm Updates | | HiddenPeak0 -
Since authorship markup requires a domain email, how can a community website allow users to link their Google+ profile?
It seems that Google now requires authors to have a valid email on the domain. This is easy for the traditional web publication. But what about community websites like SEOmoz? How can a community website allow users to link their Google+ profile? Will community websites like SEOmoz be required to 1. Give all users a domain email 2. Ask users to validate the email address with Google? Seems overly complicated.
Algorithm Updates | | designquotes0 -
Confused About Addon Domains and SEO
I find addon domains really confusing. Everyone I've asked so far says that they don't affect SEO but I find that really hard to believe considering the same content is on both a subdomain and a subfolder and also has it's own unique domain. PLUS (in my case) completely different niche sites are sharing the same hosting. I really don't want to pay for hosting for all of my different sites but at the same time, if it's better/safer to do so for Panda/Penguin reasons I'm happy to do that. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your opinions/suggestions!
Algorithm Updates | | annasusmiles0