Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
-
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name.
The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible.
Thanks!
Eric
-
Thanks, that most recent answer helped and confirmed our suspicions. There is in fact a different website for each domain. We will leave the old site in place for the time being and just link folks to the new one from there. Thanks again and sorry about any confusion.
-
Ok, in a way you are saying you have two different website one is the old one and one is the new one… or both domains open up a single website? If both websites are different then I would advise you to play safe and do not redirect instantly because redirection can cause a dip in conversions…
In that case you should focus on building links for new domain and rank it on keywords where your old keywords are located and then redirect if you want…
If this is two domains open up one website only, then isn’t it redirect already?
Still a little confusing but I am trying to answer!
-
Sorry for any confusion. The new domain (knackhq.com) is the one that doesn't rank as well. The old one (appnowgo.com) does rank pretty well for many of our keywords. This is why we are still getting 60%+ of our converts through that site. So, while I know we will have to 301 that domain eventually, we are apprehensive about doing it now if we stand to loose a large amount of that convertible traffic. We are still focusing efforts on the knackhq.com domain but just want to know if we should wait until that domain ranks better before redirecting the old domain, or just switch now.
-
Now this is confusing again... you said your old domain is not ranking or any phrases....if this is the case then redirecting 301 to new domain is the option and you will not see any dip in traffic or conversions...
but if you are saying that your old domain is ranking then the strategy will be different.
-
We are getting about 60% of our converted traffic by way of the old domain. How much dropoff should we expect when we do the redirect. I'm assuming that all of the result pages for the old domain will just go away instead of adapt to the new domain, right?
-
Check the back link profile of your Old domain at step one if it is fine and no junk link is there in the link profile... then go ahead and redirect it 301 to the new URL... It’s always good to get link juice that you are wasting anyways...
But if there is a lot of junk in the link profile of the old URL i will consider dropping that and go for the new URL as a standalone property...
In both the cases your future link building and SEO efforts should be on the new 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
-
301 redirecting a previously abused URL
A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc. So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again? Would be keen to get a few opinions on this. TIA
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
Best use of an old domain?
I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use. It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic. So what's the best way of using this for SEO? I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
To 301 or not to 301?
I have a client that is having a new site built. Their old site (WP) does not use the trailing / at the end of urls. The new site is using most of the same url names but IS using the /. For instance, the old site would be www.example.com/products and the new site, also WP, will be www.example.com/products/. WordPress will resolve either way, but my question is whether or not to go in and redirect each matching non / page to the new url that has the /. I don't want to leave any link juice on the table but if I can keep the juice without doing a few hundred 301s that certainly wouldn't suck. Any thoughts? Sleepless in KVegas
Technical SEO | | seorocket0 -
41.000 pages indexed two years after it was redirected to a new domain
Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol
Technical SEO | | MundoDeportivo0 -
Domain redirect
Recently we launched a site under a new domain, the site is doing well under the URL. Client calls me today and would like to have another domain he owns point to the new site. The domain he has has no history and no content. He is under the impression that people are looking for him by typing in www.domainxyz.com. I attempted to explain otherwise to him, but I lost. Question, what are the drawbacks of taking this domin and doing a perm redirect via . Httpaccess file?
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Room2140 -
How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain
My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains0 -
Wordpress 301 redirects
I use wordpress as CMS on a few sites and I noticed that word press automattically places 301s if I change a url etc. I believe it does it by having the following in the .htaccess file: BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Should I use this? I feel like it limits my control over the 301s.
Technical SEO | | mmaes0