Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
-
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
-
Agreed, the redirects/canonicals should be permanent (well, for as long as you want the authority to pass along).
You would see changes in serps within 2 weeks usually.
-
Some people believe that it is very important to maintain 301 redirects for a long time.
If you have mydomain.com redirecting to mynewdomain.com and remove the redirects, then any links from xyz.com that point to mydomain.com will not go to the proper destination. All of their clickthrough traffic will be lost. And, if you remove the 301 you are letting the flow of ranking value to chance. Will Google forget where those links are supposed to go five years from now. (they might not be archiving this stuff as well as you think) How about other search engines? Or new search engines.
I have redirected domains a few times and all of those domains still have their redirects in place. The cost of maintaining them is usually going to be very low compared to the possible losses.
All of my redirected domains will be in place when I go to my own funeral. And, in the "urgent" section of my business continuity plan, my heirs are instructed to protect those old domains and redirects as if they were caches of gold.
-
Hey Oleg,
again, thank you for answering to this. Just to make sure, this is more than 3 weeks now, in other words I'm good to cancel the old domain now or should I keep it as a referral?
-
I would guess similar to 301 redirects... about 2 weeks.
The faster you can get Google to recrawl the pages and index the new canonical URLs, the quicker the authority will transfer over.
-
Hi Oleg, thank you so much for your response. I have actually done all of the canonical too and removed hreflangs as I did it to alternate the switch from https as it wasn't recognizing but all done. The site still not going much I'm not sure if it's about the Fred they are talking about now or don't know, however, the question is how long should I keep the old domain been forwarding?
Thanks!
-
huh? hreflang shouldn't be part of the equation here.
If you can't setup redirects, see if you can put canonicals on old pages to the new site. That way you'll transfer ranking benefits to the new site.
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
-
Moving site to new domain without access to redirect from old to new. How can I do this with as little loss to SERP results as possible?
I've been hired to build a new site for a customer. They were duped by some shady characters at goglupe.com (If you can reach them, tell them they are rats--phone is disconnected, address is a comedy club on Mission in SF). Glupe owns the domain name and would not transfer or give FTP access prior to dropping off the face of the earth. The customer doesn't want to chase after them with lawyers, so we are moving on. New domain, new site with much of the same content as previous site. All that I have access to is the old wordpress site. I plan to build the new site, then remove all pages/posts from the old site. Is there anything I can do to salvage the current page 1 ranking? Obviously, the new domain will take some time to get back there. Just hoping to avoid any pitfalls or penalties if I can. If I had complete access, I would follow all the standard guidelines. But I don't. Any thoughts? Thanks! Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
Too much duplicate text?
Last December we started losing traffic to our website https://www.spec.lt (This is in Lithuanian).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anonimas
The thing we did was to every single company page we added QR Code. For example: https://www.spec.lt/imone/onninen-uab (at the bottom of this page). We added some text that goes with it. As you can see here http://imgur.com/a/beaYm
The only difference between those texts is the company name. Can this be the reason why google reduced our positions ? (We didn't lose any of traffic in categories/search/articles - only in company pages). A lot of companies that are new or bancrupt have little to no text at all. Except for this text about QR code, like here for example - https://www.spec.lt/imone/mazoji-bendrija-transportas-2017 Can this be the reason? Or any other on page errors that you see.
Thank you0 -
Domain Authority
Hi Our website Domain Authority isn't as high and was wondering why it's not increasing. Compared to 1 or 2 competitors we're not scoring as high as them. Are rankings are good for all chosen keywords. Just trying to get a better handle where our site is falling short on.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia1 -
Moving from Shopp to WooCommerce...
My site is ranking well on most of my products and honestly, I don't do the best job in "on product page" SEO. I've got solid URLs for each, but my "on page" grades are mostly C, D and Fs. 😞 I honestly feel fortunate that I'm ranking well and have "put off" doing much work knowing that I was going to change from the Shopp wordpress plugin to Woocommerce. Is there anything structurally that will potentially hurt me from changing framework? Do I need to make sure that the URLs are the EXACT same for each of my products or will it be okay to make them better? Ex. some pages have a less desirable URL because I just "copied" the previous item. Thanks in advance for your experience.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dp428280 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Time for a new domain post-Penguin?
Hi there, Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin. Client only has a limited 'recovery budget' Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality. Client was ranking #4 or #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales. Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales. The client, under our supervision has Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well) Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it. After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time). We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were). We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword. Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15609869897230 -
Which domain should I use?
I own a couple domains that are specific to a product and would like to know which one folks on here recommend. Primary Google Search Term Example: "Tax Bond" Example Domain 1: www.taxbonds.net Example Domain 2: www.tax-bond.net I've done research on here before and have come to the conclusion that hyphenated domains aren't bad (no more than 2 hyphens though). So, do I go for the EXACT search term with the hyphen or do I go for the pluralized search term without the hyphen, even though most people will not add the "s" in the Google search? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
URL Parking and Frame Forwarding..
I have a few URLs... Is there any benefit for me to frame forward these empty domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0