We sold our site's domain and have a new one. Where do we go from here?
-
We recently sold our established domain -- for a compelling price -- and now have the task of transitioning to our new domain. What steps would you recommend to lesson the anticipated decline from search engines in this scenario?
-
You should have migrated the sold domains "authority" to the new site using Google Webmaster Tools. Doing this would have transferred all of your SEO to the new site. However, since this was not done (or 301 redirect each link to the new site), i'm sorry to say that you'll need to start over
-
Thanks! We have a grace period of time of roughly 120 days before the new domain owners can switch the DNS on the domain, so it sounds like we should jump on the 301s immediately.
-
As mentioned above, if I had just bought your domain, I wouldn't leave any 301s in place and would probably be the first thing I removed, so unless you have it in the contract that they have to leave any 301s in place, its basically a brand new domain.
What you could do is contact the web masters who are linking to your old domain, explain that you have changed domain names and would they like to update their site. Explain to them, this will help their users otherwise they the user could get a bad experience of getting a 404 page and could hurt the web masters brand, if they are seen to be linking off to dead pages.
I would also recommend doing a lot of social messages, same great website just a new name, otherwise people will still be searching for your old name.
But the bad news is, you have a new domain and you are basically starting from scratch, (with the little help of being able to contact previous web masters and changing links). You will suffer a drop in rankings and will take a while to recover.
-
If you were not able to do any redirects on the old domain, there won't so much be a decline as it will be starting over from scratch. Were you able to put any 301 redirects on the old domain that the new owners will leave?
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
-
How can improve Domain Athturitymy web site
Hi;
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tohid1363b
I have a website that had an authoritative domain of 10 but today it has reached 5. I wanted to know what the reason for these changes was.
need improve my rank in Google my goal keyword . Can you guide my servant? need +5 Domain , and over +50 Page Aithroity .. my site: خریدگیفت کارت0 -
One of my Friend's website Domain Authority is Reducing? What could be the reason?
Hello Guys, One of my friend's website domain authority is decreasing since they have moved their domain from HTTP to https.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max_
There is another problem that his blog is on subfolder with HTTP.
So, can you guys please tell me how to fix this issue and also it's losing some of the rankings like 2-5 positions down. Here is website URL: myfitfuel.in/
here is the blog URL: myfitfuel.in/mffblog/0 -
Impact of simplifying website and removing 80% of site's content
We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited. The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability. Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
301 from one site to another
I have two e-commerce websites and i'm going to remove some products from website as requested by a supplier and sell them only on one site. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2?? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Moving Entire Domain to New Site with New File Extensions
I have been looking for a while for a good an clear Step by Step guide for moving a site from an old to a new domain... so I guess a good discussion here, could help many web masters have a smooth transition. So in your opinion, beside the obvious, what are the most important steps you must take? Here is what I do: 1. 301 old site to new one and TEST.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dhidalgo1
2. Check Internal Links - Double Check for 404's.
3. Update your Social Profiles with new URL.
4. Let GWT and BWT of the change and request a Crawl.
5. Contact as Many of Webmaster as you possibly can to point your links to your new domain. What's missing? What have you found helpful and/or Effective?0 -
How can i redirect my site to other domain ?
I have been running an eCommerce site since 2008 and have a PR3 with mostly have an authority link from reputed sites, how can I transfer my existing eCommerce site to the new domain so in the new domain i get SEO value from the old domain. Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
New gTLD's, buy or wait and see?
Is the new gTLD scheme from ICANN worth the money? I manage a brand relatively well-known in our own market segment. Would I benefit from moving from .com and national TLDs for my international sites to my own brand TLD? Are there any obvious SEO pros and cons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0