Renaming your domain from an existing live domain and SEO implications - Please Help *shudder*
-
Please see the details below.
Site A: http://south-african-holiday.mobi is an existing site that is our best site. It is Joomla 3.1 and runs all our ecommerce.
Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky. joomla 1.5 and all bookings (tour site) are redirected to Site A for processing.
Instead of redesigning the Site A I'd like to change the domain name of http://south-african-holiday.mobi -> http://southerncircle.com
So far my reading and research (Thanks MOZ for awesome forum!) has provided me with:
1. Do the SEO groundwork. i.e. remove dead links from both sites. Delete useless content and generally tidy up both sites.
2. Map all pages from site a: http://southerncircle.com -> http://south-africa-holiday/ so that the existing pages that have good ranking will have a home on the new site.
3. When ready do a small sample 301 redirect from: http://southerncircle.com to http://south-africa-holiday.mobi.
4. arghhhh now I'm stuck ..... If I redirect to this site then I lose my http://southerncircle.com domain which is what I want to keep....I just want the .mobi site to move to the southerncircle.com site....
I don't consider myself totally thick but this is really confuseing the *$%# out of me
PLEASE could you give me some insight here. I'm sure it has been done before without completely losing the sites seo ranking and sending my site into SEO oblivion.
If there are any JOOMLA gurus that have done this I'd love to hear from you as well.
Many thanks in advance.
-
Hello
You may also want to try rel="canonical" (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en) or find out some better services for redirection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#URL_redirection_services)
Also, and anyway, if you would like to keep your page rank, domain authority, and url, i would also suggest that you can just re write (by copy and paste) the whole best website code and structure as well as content, and have it all on the old domain. It seems to me the best solution, at least unless its not to hard to re create the website..
hope it helped
eugenio
-
This is totally awesome response! straight forward and systematic! Thank you soo much for this. I'm going to leave the question up for a bit longer to get more feedback but this is exactly what my research has told me to do ..just not so succinctly.
-
Hi Patrick.
Here's what I would do:-
1. Carry out a site crawl of http://southerncircle.com and make a record of all of the URL's. If you don't have any software for doing this then use ScreamingFrog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ - There's also a really good guide for using ScreamingFrog here - http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide.
2. Make sure that both of the domains are set-up and verified in Google Webmaster Tools for both www. and non-www.
3. Make full back-ups of both your http://southerncircle.com and your http://south-africa-holiday.mobi domains (database and files) keep these on file just in case you need them again.
4. Migrate your http://south-africa-holiday.mobi site over to your http://southerncircle.com domain hosting account.
5. Add a site redirect to the .htaccess file in the root of the http://south-africa-holiday.mobi domain. For Joomla just add this :-
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
redirect 301 / http://www.southerncircle.comThe above will move your .mobi site over to the .com and make sure than anyone visiting the .mobi site will redirect correctly. You now need to make sure that you keep any of the link equity that you had in the .com site.
6. From the list of URLs that you took in step 1 you need to work out the most relevant page on the new site to redirect site visitors to. Within the .htaccess file of the .com domain you now need to set-up redirects for all of these URL's. A brief visit to Google will show you how to set these redirects up but basically:-
redirect 301 /old-page http://southerncircle.com/new-page
This should look after all of the redirects but just to make sure it is worth while just checking that you haven't missed out any important pages that have links pointing to them by carrying out an orphaned link check - http://www.teapotcreative.com/blog/entry/finding-and-fixing-orphaned-links-using-majestic-excel-and-screaming-frog
7. Inform Google of a site address change via Google webmaster Tools.
8. Carry out a canonicalisation check on the .com domain - http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/ - and fix any issues.
9. Add the new site to a Moz Campaign to check for any site errors.
-
This should be of great help: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
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
-
Does a root domain get SEO power from its subdomains?
Hi there! I'd appreciate your help with the following case: a) Current 10-year-old website (community) on root domain "example.com" (250,000 incoming quality-backlinks) will move to the new subdomain "newsub.example.com" (301 redirects to the new subdomain for all current subfolders) b) A new website (shop) will launch on the root domain "example.com" Question: Will the new website on "example.com" get SEO power from the old website on "newsub.example.com"? SEO power = linkjuice/authority/trust/history/etc. from the 250,000 backlinks. What I'm trying to achieve: Maintain the built-up SEO power for the root domain "example.com" Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! P.S. Plenty has been written about subdomains inheriting from their root domains (so please don't share input on the subdomain vs. subfolder debate). But I can't find satisfactory info about the other way around (root domains inheriting from their subdomains), e.g. if wikia.com gets SEO power from its subdomains superman.wikia.com, starwars.wikia.com, etc.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ebebeb0 -
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains.
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains. I have dissected the site and link, content, etc profile using ahrefs tools, still no luck, and unfortunately they do not have a community to ask anyone opinion. Hoping someone on Moz will be able to provide me with a secondary opinion or something I obviously missing here. Looking for any constructive feedback/professional opinion with fresh look on what maybe the cause of our down rankings and what may be a cause of it. Any feedback is very much appreciated. Search Term: 3030 aventura condos / One of our link samples (SE Position #6): https://goo.gl/FbYj4V Competing Domains (SE Position #1): https://goo.gl/fLPKX5 Competing Domains (SE Position #2): https://goo.gl/GqXGse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Im_Jake0 -
What a PBN is? please describe how you use them for SEO.
what a PBN is? please describe how you use them for SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Green.landon0 -
Sub-Domain or Folder. Which is better for SEO.?
Hey all. I just need clarification that which one is better to use for big property or travel portal. Check below example: I have a website which runs for multiple location like india, uk, canada, uae. For every location the content is different. So my question is that for better SEO results should i use india.xyz.com or **xyz.com/india/ **. One more example **canada.xyz.com **or xyz.com/canada/ Can anyone please suggest which one is better. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PFX1110 -
Is having a .uk.com domain a hindrance for long-term SEO?
I know there has been some mention on Moz Q&A for .uk.com, but not for at least 3 years. So I wanted to see if any Mozzers out there knew if having a .uk.com domain would hinder our SEO long-term? Our company is finally now taking SEO seriously and we're planning some great stuff for the year ahead, but I have a feeling that our .uk.com domain may prevent us from out-ranking some of the bigger companies out there. Does anyone have any thoughts about this out there? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Can someone please help me understand my sites recent loss of rankings?
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. I have a Page Authority of 53, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 40, user reviews and quality content. I did discover that another URL I using was set to a 302 instead of a 301 for some reason. I don't necessarily think this was an issue as Google should know which is the trusted URL and therefore which content to list. I removed this redirect completely about 3 weeks ago, but I've seen no improvement. I'm looking at improving various things, but I'm still not sure why I've been hit and wonder if I'm missing something obvious? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
SEO & Magento Multistore - I have been asked if "duplicatiing" a magento stor using its "Multistore" functionality will cause both to be picked up as duplicate content, can anybody help?
Hello all. I have been asked what the consequences of using Magento's "multistore" functionality are if we were to duplicate our entire magento store and place it on a secondary domain... The simple answer which comes to my mind is that it will be a flagged as duplicate content. However, is this still the case if the site were placed in a different country? The original being the UK the copy being Ireland (both English speaking) How would Google.co.uk & Google.ie treat these stores? Hope this is clear... our site is http://www.tower-health.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TowerHealth0 -
Should I 301 a penalized domain to another domains subfolder?
I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0