Changing Domain
-
We have an old domain that we have had registered for many years(pinpoint;asersystems.com) and redirected to our regular domain (which is a short version of our name (pinlaser.com). Management wants to switch and use the longer version as the primary domain for branding purposes.
I have cautioned against this for many reasons:
Need to do 100's of redirects
Potential loss of back links
Most links will now be 301 redirects and not look natural to search engines.
I would appreciate feedback on any and all risks associated with this potential move.
Thanks.
-
If you did that - now you have 2 URLs customers can reach you. I know it would help people, but you now have 2 online "brands"/urls.
-
Good points....but we would still redirect old URL to new URL so they could still type in shorter url to get to homepage.
-
Technically - yes you can do it. You can use 301 redirects and make it all work without too much of a hit. You will get a bit of a hit short term and if you setup all the redirects properly, recover within 3-6 months.
I like Rands recent post to move to moz.com as a nice case study
http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/
Now - throw out everything I just typed. You have to consider that your "brand" online is the shorter URL. People are used to it, they already have habits and bookmarks and emails, etc etc in place. You could "screw up" your online brand and not need to. Plus, longer URLs are a pain in the butt. Why frustrate your users by making them type in a longer URL? Why frustrate all the people who want to email you when they have to type out a longer URL? Why, why why?
Southwest Airlines uses southwest.com, American Airlines uses AA.com, New York Times uses nytimes.com, I could go on, there are big brands that use shorter URLs. People are lazy, why increase friction when trying to get people to your site. I know for a fact that people search more often for keywords "NYC $services" vs typing our "New York City $services" (service could be a locksmith or restaurant etc) - why? Who wants to type all that out when you can just put in NYC?
You could argue about the technical reasons, but what will convince them is if you give them the reasons why customers will not like the new domain, I think that is your best bet.
-
It wouldn't be an easy task for sure, but if done carefully and following all others previous experiences (like the transition of SEOMoz to Moz), you should be in pretty good shape.
You will however, see a decrease in organic traffic for a few days, but that should return to normal after a few days. Both Google and Bing have an option that allows you to inform them about an URL change.
Just make sure everything is well redirected/canonicalized.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Sub Domain Usage
I see that the gap uses gap.com, oldnavy.gap.com and bananarepublic.gap.com. Wouldn't a better approach for SEO to have oldnavy.com, bananarepublic.com and gap.com all separate? Is there any benefit to using the approach of store1.parentcompany.com, store2.parentcompany.com etc? What are the pros and cons to each?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81780 -
Is there a way to increase domain authority?
Dear all, when I see moz analytics for my blog irctcloginindia.co.in, it is legging behind only in terms of diomain authority when compared to my competitors. Because of which it is ranking low. Is there any short cut or fast method using which I can increase the authority for my domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irctclogin0 -
Which Domain is better
Which domain is better for SEO. vehiclewrapslasvegasnv.com Or vehicle-wraps-lasvegas-nv.com Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
CHange insite Urls structure
Hello Guys! I have a situation with a website and I need some opinions. Today, the structured of my site is: (I have had this site architecture since many years) Main country home (www.mysite.com.tld) o Product_1 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product1/) § Product_1 articles www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_art1 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_art2 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_artx o Product_2 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product2/) § Product_2 articles www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_art1 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_art2 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_artx I have several TLDs with their main and their products. We are thinking in modify this structure and begin to use subdomains for each product (The IT guys need this approach because is simpler to distribute the servers load). I not very friendly with subdomains and big changes like this always can produce some problem (although the SEO migration would be ok, problems could appear, like ranking drops), But, the solution (the reasons are technical stuff), requires the mix of directories and subdomains in each product, leaving the structured in this way: Main country home (www.mysite.com.tld) o Product_1 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product1/) § Product_1 articles product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_art1 product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_art2 product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_artx o Product_2 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product2/) § Product_2 articles product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_art1 product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_art2 product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_artx So, the product home will be in a directory buy the pages of the articles of this product will be in a subdomain. What do you think about this solution? Beyond that the SEO migration would be fine, 301s, etc, can bring us difficulties in the rankings or the change can be done without any consideration? Thanks very much! Agustin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTeamDespegar0 -
301 redirect to multiple domain
Hi guys, I have a domain A, B and C. The domain A was an association of two business and they are about to split. Parts of domain A are going to be redirect to domain B, but some content belong to the domain C. So my question : Is it possible to 301 redirect some pages from A to B and some other pages from A to C and if yes, what would be the impact on SEO ? Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevePatenaude0 -
New Website. Changing TLD or not?
Hi, At my company we are making a new website because the days of the old one are numbered. We already decided that the folder structure will be changed so we have more "clean" url's. Now we also would like to change from .net/nl to .nl . Since we already are redirecting all url's (>10.000), we think this is the moment to switch the TLD. What do you guys think? Is their anyone who has some kind of experience/tip they would like to share?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Is it worth buying a Dropped domain?
I've got a domain which was registered in July 2010 and had a website on it. I believe the domain expired and it was dropped for a couple of months. I snapped it up after discovering it in November 2012. Subsequently, the whois records show the domain was created in Nov 2012. What exactly is the "real" age of this domain from Google's perspective? Or at least, as far as SEO is concerned? Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | syed002
Syed P.S - domain age does indeed warrant some merit in ranking factors!0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0