New website and new domain
-
Hi,
We have a domain with current e-commerce site on, about 5 years old.
We have a new website being built with a different company and a new domain name.
We are transferring our old domain over to new provider and 301'ing the domain to new domain.
However, we can not take the current website with us, so we lose all our links/pages etc..
How important would it be to take a wrap of our current website to keep all the pages alive?
Is there anything we can do so oldurl.com/brand/tshirt/ doesnt lose its rank? Can we 301 individual pages if we dont have the actual website? Just the domain name.
Any help be great.
Thanks
-
Hi,
We are not using the same domain name as its not user friendly. It is brandname-online.com rather than brandnameonline.com or brandnameonline.co.uk. Its a pain in the arse for emails, telling people over the phone and general stuff regardless of the SEO side of it. Many people dont use the -
We own the domain name but we can not take the website. So my thinking was that if we cant take the website, then we cant take all the links we have out there that go to anything other than the root domain brandname-online.com.? Is this correct?
My problem is I dont think we can 301 all the individual products pages (some of which will have sold out anyways) to the new website? Rather we can just 301 the current domain to our new domain? Do I have that wrong?
In brief...
We have a website and a domain name
We can not take the website itself
We CAN take the domain nameWe have bought a new domain name
We plan on 301'in the current domain to the new domainDo we have any work around for individual pages on current domain to get them to the new domain ? Or will our 301 on the current domain send all traffic to current site to our new websites homepage?
THanks
-
Howdie,
While I've gotten much better at technical SEO due to necessity over the last 4 years, I still don't consider it my "forte." That being said...Are you maintaining ownership of the old domain or have you sold it? If you still own the old domain, I dont see any reason why you can't 301-redirect individual pages from the old domain to the new domain. Moz.com just went through this scenario...quite successfully it seems. If you aren't maintaining ownership of the old domain, I think that was a mistake and agree with Lesley. Hold on for the ride because it's about to get ugly.
Sorry, I don't mean to be negative, but domain migrations are scary even for the best in the business. If there's any way in hell to do it, 301 your old pages to new "equivalent" pages on the new domain. Even if you do that, hold on for the ride. It will still most probably be ugly for a few months.
Good wishes and I hope all goes well!
Dana
-
Why are you not using the same domain name? I think you are going to have ranking problems and customer trust issues by changing the domain name.
On the other hand since you own the domain, I would run a tool like screaming frog on it to spider it. Then when you move the hosting, write 301 redirects from all of the old products and pages to the new corresponding one.
But if there is any chance that you can keep the 5 year old domain and it is not penalized, I would. Domain trust is an important factor.
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
-
Website Server Issue?
I'm getting error messages that a website cannot be crawled and it might be due to the following issues: Couldn't access the webpage because the server either timed out or refused/closed the connection before our crawler could receive a response. How to fix: Please contact your web hosting technical support team and ask them to fix the issue Could Possibly Be:
Web Design | | PrimeMediaConsulting
1. DDoS protection system.
OR
2. Overloaded or misconfigured server They asked me to talk to my hosting company about this issue and he's at a loss (I don't think he knows everything he needs to know potentially). Have you seen these issues before? Where is the best spot to start troubleshooting this issue?0 -
Are jobsite themes harder to optimize than say a traditional website?
Until recently I have enjoyed a great deal of success with SEO on my websites and clients websites. SEO is more of a hobby than a profession for me however I am really struggling with my latest website www.securityjobsuk.co.uk - The keywords are easy, 1. security jobs and 2. security vacancies. The site has vanished off radar completely since I used the jobify theme. Has anyone had similar experience with job boards? Do they require more TLC / expert attention?
Web Design | | SJUK0 -
Responsive design or mobile website for SEO
Because domains with a mobile version have better rankings in Google then domains with only a deskop version we're considering a mobile website. My web developer says that a m.domain.com is duplicated with the domain.com, and he recommends a responsive design. What is better for SEO positions in mobiles devices. A m.domain mobile website or a responsive design. What are influential factors?
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
Website Updates, will this affect my ranking/ DA or PA?
Hello All! My website is due for a big update soon, my current site is doing ok, however I want to update all of the content, structure, style and look of my whole site. I feel that with the way it's been going lately that it's time for an upgrade, my question is, will this affect my ranking? Will my page ranking's be affected? Will my DA be affected? I intend to optimize this new website perfectly too with all the things I've learnt since joining this forum. All the best, Paul
Web Design | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Website Redesign 301 Question
Hey Moz gang, I have a question that I believe I know how I'm going to handle, but just wanted some feedback from the Moz community on best practices. At my company, we're going through a site redesign. At the moment, our site is deeper than it should be with many one-off feature pages. For example, we have a Features page that then links to individual pages for each specific feature. One goal we have set for the redesign is a condensing of the pages in order to make the site more user-friendly, easy to manage and content rich. My question is this. We have a lot of these individual pages that I want to essentially kill and merge into one page. It is okay (best practice) to 301 all of those individual feature specific pages to the single Features page since that is now where all of that content lives?? I want to retain the link juice that those pages have gained over time, but I don't want to get penalized for too many 301's to a single page. Any advice or previous experience would be awesome 🙂 Thanks, Lance
Web Design | | RobinBryant10 -
Changing URL's for a website redesign
Hi folks, We're redesigning our website and looking for some advice on how changing our URL's would affected our rankings. If the page URLs are changing how can we carry out redirects to avoid losing any SEO rank? Thanks, Ross
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Sub domain or separate domain?
Hi Mozzers, I'm redesigning a property database, and wondered whether it would be better to put this on a sub domain of my site or to set up a completely separate domain? Back story: My core website is about lifestyle, holidays and property in France. It's very popular, and benefits massively from long tail search. It's a fairly strong, recognisable brand, so I assume any association the database has with the site would greatly benefit it... Maybe. My current property database on the other hand is very poor in terms of SEO/visibility, etc, so we're having the whole thing redesigned from scratch. For the database, is it better to set up a subdomain of my strong branded site, or set up a completely new domain targeting keywords in the URL? Cheers! Matt
Web Design | | Horizon0