Migration to a new domain
-
Hi everyone,
So i have one project where I'm planning to move current content on new domain, two reasons:
1. It seems current domain has some google penalty (backlink related, not manual)
2. Client wants rebranding and already has domain with new brand name.
So as content is high quality and there is no content related penalty from google, what would be the best way to migrate existing content without passing any penalty AND without Google treating it as duplicate content. If i do 301 i suspect any penalty there is might follow, if i just copy existing content it won't be original content, what is the best solution here?
Thanks
-
Lil help here..
-
Hi, yes it's definitely penalty, website doesn't even rank first on domain name. About traffic it's already down to 1/3 of what it was so i don't think it would be a problem.
Sorry but i still don't get your answer fully: move how exactly? with redirects, just deindex on old domain and then move & index on new one or what? This is my main question here..
-
Let's understand your case
- It seems the current domain has some google penalty - Are you sure about it? Are you sure that is not a case of a backlink devaluation or site devaluation? or even an algorithm update? this point is very important because the steps to follow are completely different. So the first thing that you need to do is make an in deep research of your backlink profile and I'm not talking about a simple audit quick and bullshit audit. I'm talking to research your backlinks and the backlinks pointing to your backlinks ( Using every tool that you have available in my case I use Moz, Aherfs Majestic and Search Console)
- The client wants to rebrand and already has a domain with a new brand name. You need to make it clear to the client all the risks involved, the first one and most important is time involved to recover the traffic. You will see a lot of articles out there about it of how to do it in the right way. But most of them are complete bulls...t. At the end of the day is just a simple database (a huge database of course). So you need to keep in mind when you migrate a website from the Google perspective is a new thread on its database so at the beginning you will notice a low level of indexations (that is a completely normal process no matter what you saw or read on any post or article) and of course a low-level traffic
The best way to deal with the new domain is this one at least base on my experience,
- Make it gradually that means to divide the content into small pieces and start to move it.
- Build some new backlinks (even before the migration) to this new domain and also backlinks to your backlinks
- Also, add new content or update the old one
- Invest I on social signal to the new domain / new content
Hope these comments help you with your project
Regards
-
P.S. I thought deindexing current domain and then publishing content to new domain, but if parts of content was shared on different social media or just copied by someone, wouldn't it become the original after deindexing current domain?
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
-
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Do you get links from new websites?
There's a new industry specific website that looks decent. It's clean and nothing spammy. However, it's so new it's DA is under 10. Is it worth pursuing a link from a site like this? On one hand, there's nothing spammy and it is industry specific. On the other...it's just DA is so terrible (worse than any of our other links), I don't want it to hurt us. Any thoughts? Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local. My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted. I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Should I serve images from the same Top level domain as the current domain?
We run a multidomain e-commerce website that targets each country respectively: .be -> Belgium .co.uk -> United Kingdom etc... .com for all other countries We also serve our product images via a media subdomain eg. "media.ourdomain.be/image.jpg"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jef2220
This means that all TLD's contain the images of the .be media subdomain. Which is acually seen as an outbound link. We are considering to change this setup so that it serves the images from the same domain as the current TLD, which would make more sense: .be will serve images from media.ourdomain.be .co.uk -> media.ourdomain.co.uk etc.. My question is: Does google image search take the extension of the TLD into consideration? So that for example German users will be more likely to see an image that is served on a .de domain?0 -
Moving to a new domain
We currently rank well in our niche on a long (and ambiguous) domain, but want to rebrand and have a shorter and more memorable domain. Keeping in mind we're already pointing good links at the new domain (301ing them to the old site), how long should we age the domain before switching the content and 301ing the old site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | errspy0 -
Brand Name in Domain name
I am thinking to make a site for amazon affiliate ,but hesitate to get a domain name related to brand name like samsungxxxxxxxxx.com .getting such domain name is good or bad ? advice me to proceed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
New URL : Which is best
Which is best: www.domainname.com/category-subcategory or www.domainname.com/subcategory-category or www.domainname.com/category/subcategory or www.domain.com/subcategory/category I am going to have 12 different subcategories under the category
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Brand new domain with a lot of old links.
So I just bought http://penny-auctions.co/ a couple of days ago, ignore the fact it's not set up yet and generally just a mess, and something kept bugging me about why the domain authority kept showing as 25 in the SEOmoz toolbar. Now initially I'd set it up as www. and with the trailing slash so the PA was 1, however after a bit of exploration it seems that someone has been building links to the non-www version of the domain for at least a year! The site has never been owned before so I've now made the non-www version the default and have a 5 day old site with PA 35 and DA 25! SEOmoz shows PA - 45 links, 20 domains and DA - 341 links, 113 domains. Majestic Historic - 8598 links, 236 domains and Fresh - 160 links, 62 domains. Brilliant! Except they're all spamtastic. What do you think this will do for my future attempts at ranking? Should I create pages that have links to them or just 301 them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StalkerB0