Domain Change, loss of inbound links ...
-
We're strongly considering a domain name change; this is purely for marketing reasons. We think in the long term, this will be a good thing. I believe we can mitigate the page redirection, branding changes, etc.
My concern are the inbound links: from 200+ domains, 3,000+ links.
So, I guess we can contact each of the top sites linking to us and hope they update our links. I'm not hopeful. I believe we'll loose must of the links.
Has anyone been down this road and have experience to share?
What should I expect, worst case? Is there a way to mitigate?Thanks much.
Jim -
We just went through this exact same change for marketing reasons. With a combination of 301 redirects and a ton of new content we found our organic dropped significantly on day one but after a period of about two weeks now things have bounced back and in some cases the new content has allowed us to rank better.
Our previous site had tons of outdated code and was not particularly clean. Pages now load much faster, the new look seems to have increased the number of pages per visit as well as time on site. If we had to do it over again tomorrow we certainly would. Sometimes not renovating the site I think costs you more in the long run.
Hope this helps.
Gary
-
Hi Jim,
Yes you actually have to do quite a bit to keep your site from losing its traction. You will most likely see a drop in rank regardless of how well you do it. The amount of time could be a day to a week if you do it right if you do it wrong it could be until you fix it or regain the links
It is not wise to lose that amount of links it will be like your site is committing suicide. Simply 301 redirect them using the information below if you cannot get the original owner of the site who links to you to link to your new domain.
When done properly you must use all the tools at your disposal to find your back links
Moz open site Explorer
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
MajesticSEO
Ahrefs
if I were you I would subscribe to the other 2 for one month in order to get the data I needed. Some people use Raven tools because it incorporates MajesticSEO for back links however I do not believe it is as good as actually using MajesticSEO
http://raventools.com/marketing-tools/seo-software/
Sost of what you need is answered in this question below.
http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch
here is a bigger version of the and photograph if it cannot be seen very well.
http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif
I strongly recommend buying the tool called screaming frog SEO spider if you're going to be the one doing this
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
combine that with the SEER interactive guide on screaming frog and the information in the URL above and you will be in good shape.
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Jim-
If there are any links in your control or from places you have a close relationship with, I would recommend updating those. However, you don't need to worry about updating the rest of the external links.
You simply need to set-up 301 redirects from the old website to the corresponding page on the new website.
oldsite.com/blue-widgets.html-> 301 to newsite.com/blue-widgets
Make sure a 301 redirect is used. Read more about redirects here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
After making the updates, you will usually see a slight loss in organic traffic that tends to recover after time. Changing websites, replacing old pages with new pages, etc are all common practices on the web. In general the search engines handle them really well when a 301 is in place.
Good luck!
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
-
Inbound link analysis
Hi all! we are doing some back link analysis on a clients competitors site. The competitor has roughly 300,000 links generated from an estimated 1,500 domain names. Is there an easy way to determine how many of the 300,000 links come from which of the 1,500 domain names? Essentially we want to see which of these domain names are generating the majority links? Is there a tool we can use to determine this? Or is it good old fashioned leg work? Ideas...? Thanks in advance 🙂 Phil.
Link Building | | Globalgraphics0 -
How many links per week/month should a link building campaign acquire?
I am running a linkbuilding campaign for my company. I am mostly focusing on guest blogging opportunities and responding to emails from HARO. How many links would I have to acquire each week or month to be considered doing a good job over a 6 month or a year time period? Thank you,
Link Building | | fersu0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
I have 87,636 links to my website from a single domain, is this bad?
Hi guys I have 87,636 links from one website, of which 75,189 of those link to my homepage using my website name as the anchor. Another has 29,811 links back to my website, again the majority of the links using my website name as the anchor. Is this a bad thing? Let me explain how this has happened - a company by the name of Daylife uses our RSS feed and distributes this to hundreds of their clients, which include indiatimes, usatoday, dallasnews etc, now I noticed that the majority of these websites all link back to our website with the same anchor text used several times on a single page. Attached is an example. Would this be a bad thing seen as the majority of these links have the same anchor text and link to my homepage? Looking at my GWT there is an estimated 183,373 backlinks that are all like this. Our traffic has dropped since Mr Panda hit and I am trying to find out if this could be adding to the problem. Thank you for you time links.jpg
Link Building | | hstdigital0 -
Looking at Page Authority of a link to our website... what Page Authority number should we use in deciding the link is junk?
What are the Page Authority ranges? 1. Excellent link 2. Moderate 3. Total junk link Of course you look at the anchor text you can use, how many links are on the site, how often it is cached. Thoughts?
Link Building | | RezStream80 -
High Domain Authority Even Though It has spam links to it...?
I own a domain that can provide links to my website, but it seems to have picked up a lot of spammy links - 2000+ linking domains. SeoMoz toolbar still gives it a domain authority of 66. Should I use the domain to link to my site? Or will it have a negative impact?
Link Building | | barnst0 -
Tracking new inbound links
I suspect there might be an easy way to do this.. but alas Icould not seem to find it with by performing some search queries in the Q and A thus figured I would just ask :).. sorry if being repetitive with this question. I have all sorts of tools to track the number of overall inbound links to my site, but is there an easy tool to check for specific new inbound links from one specific page/site..aka if I set up a link in a directory or I get a mention in an article.. what is the easiest way to search to see if this link has been picked up by google and how much link juice it might be giving to my site? Thanks for your time, John
Link Building | | JohnHerrigel0