Redirecting main www. subdomain to new domain. Can you then create a new subdomain on the old domain?
-
Hi there,
The scenario is this:
- We have been working on a rebrand and have changed the company name
- So, we want to redirect www.old-name.com to www.new-name.com
- However, the parent company is retaining the old brand name for corporate purposes
- So, in an ideal world, we'd be able to keep www.old-name.com active - but clearly that would sacrifice all of the authority built up over the years, so we do have to redirect the main www. subdomain in it's entirity.
- However - one suggested solution is to redirect www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com... but then create a new corporate subdomain: for example, business.old-domain.com
- business.old-domain.com will not be competing with the new site on any service/product related terms; it will only need to appear in SERPs for the company name
I'd appreciate some thoughts on this, as I've not done this before or found any examples of anyone that has.
Is that a massive risk in terms of sending a confusing message to Google?
Thanks for your help
-
I have done this many times and if you are sending the redirects to appropriate urls on the other site this is a non issue. I have done it with sites with 100K links.
If they were in some way buying non relevant domains and redirecting that would be different.
-
Robert,
when redirecting one domain to another, all the links pointing to the old domain will be pointing to the new domain, that will increase drastically the number of liks on the new domain. That could be taken as a SPAM action by Google.
Well, technically speaking it would not harm the new domain linkbuilding. It would make look it really unnatural.
-
How does redirecting the old domain to the new harm new domain link building? I can't see it even if the new domain had one link and the old had 20K.
-
You need to separate SEO from branding for a minute.
You are saying subdomain and then presenting the www subdomain and I want to be clear that is what your intent was? If instead you are saying we have domain old-company.com and now we are going to be under domain new-company.com and we want the authority built on old-company.com then, YES, you need to do the 301 redirect of urls on old-company.com to new-company.com urls.
Now, in terms of the parent owning brand Old-Company you need to first be clear with them they do not own domain old-company.com in any way as that would negate your ability to keep the redirects once they start using it.
Google is looking at the brand only in terms of branded searches, etc. There is no branding issue beyond that. So, if the parent has domain oldcompany.com vs old-company.com or they add in The-old-company, etc. they are ok if they are ok from a business sense with that change. they do not need to have a subdomain to the previous domain like best.old-company.com
I cannot see them using the old domain in any way as being good for you. But, any variant of that old domain (not your sub domain variant with something.old-company.com) would be fine.
If I were parent and brand were a real issue, I would not relinquish the domain for any reason. If I were you and you believe you must have the redirects, I would negotiate with, "we cannot do the deal if we cannot "retire" the domain and use it as we wish except not visible on the Internet." I think you understand.
Hope that helps,
Robert
-
Hi,
The risk that you're taking depends on how different are the old and the new brand. Also, considering the case that this change implies a change in the category of the site. (i.e. technology to furniture).
In the part of the subdomains, I dont see any complications on redirecting the subdomains and creating the new "business.old-brand.com". Of course you do have to analyze the linkbuilding profile of the old domain, and how it would impact in the new domain.
A quick and easy example, old domain has 10k links and new domain has 2k links. After the redirect, 10k links will go to the new domain, this could do much harm to the new domain linkbuilding.Hope I was clear enough to make me understand.
GR.
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
-
Our subdomain hosts content that can not be optimized (static videos) - should I de-index it?
We host static tours on a subdomain that points to the video tour host. I can not add meta or optimize any of these video pages and there are thousands. Should I de-index the entire subdomain? I am seeing errors for no meta, dup content etc in MOZ reporting. If yes, do I add the Disallow: /subdomain.root.nl/ to the primary domain's website/CMS or in DNS records ? Our web company is saying the no follow needs to be added in DNS but I feel like it should be added to the robots.txt file if SERP's are going to acknowledge the sub is no longer to be crawled and the primary is no longer to be penalized. Thank you so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonmorse0 -
Can I run a successful SEO campaign for a subdomain?
My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teachbanzai0 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
Redirecting Domain / Maintaining Keyword Ranking
Right now we have two sites: "our-company.com" and "cool-widgets.com." We rank high for "cool widgets" searches due to our keyword-friendly URL, but we're merging everything into our newly-redesigned company site. Should we redirect the old "cool-widgets.com" homepage to "our-company.com" (to directly transfer the old PR and links), or would it be more prudent to redirect the old homepage to "our-company.com/cool-widgets" to keep the "cool widgets" keyword in the URL? This option seems like it would be good for maintaining organic search results, but it wouldn't pass the strong link backbone to the new site's homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | versare0 -
Move to new domain with new design and url
I have an e-commerce website that is template based and I have absolutely no control over it. Each product have quite good ranking in google. However, we are creating new website using asp.net mvc and host in azure. It has totally new design. Since I have no control over my old website, I cannot force the server to redirect each product page to my new website product page. This is what I have done so far. I told my old website provider to point my domain (ex. domainA.com) to new nameserver at dyndns I created a new zone and add a http redirect service to new domain (http://www.domainB.com) with 301 redirect I'm pretty sure that this is not enough since there is a difference in url like this Old: www.domainA.com/product/70/my-product-name New: www.domainB.com/product/1/my-new-product-name New route config: {product}/{id}/{name} As you can see, the structure is similar but the product id and name is different. Do I need to catch the incoming id and name from old website and 301 redirect it again to the correct one? If so, this will cause double 301 redirect and would this be a SEO problem? Thank you in advance for your answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | as142208080 -
301 Redirect from unused domain
Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19771 -
Domain vs Subdomain for Multi-Location Practice
I have a client who has 2 locations (Orlando & Tampa) and would like to keep the current domain for both locations (DA 29). We want to target additional cities within each service area (Orlando & Tampa). Each service area would target 2 cities on the main pages and 4-5 cities with "SEO" pages which contains unique content specific to the given city. Would I be better off creating sub domains (www.orlando.domain.com & www.tampa.domain.com), creating subfolders (www.domain.com/orlando, etc) or keeping the domain as is and create SEO pages specific to each city? We want to spread the domain authority to both locations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Red_Spot_Interactive0 -
Keyword Rich Domain Redirects to Brand Name But How Will SEO Work For It?
If i have a keyword rich domain name, but i redirect it to a brand domain name, will doing seo for the keyword rich domain name be effective in showing up on google under that domain, for the keyword i do SEO for? or does this cause a conflict for spiders/robots as soon as they realize the page they want to check out is getting redirected to another domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lafurniturestore2