Domain Change, loss of inbound links ...
-
We're strongly considering a domain name change; this is purely for marketing reasons. We think in the long term, this will be a good thing. I believe we can mitigate the page redirection, branding changes, etc.
My concern are the inbound links: from 200+ domains, 3,000+ links.
So, I guess we can contact each of the top sites linking to us and hope they update our links. I'm not hopeful. I believe we'll loose must of the links.
Has anyone been down this road and have experience to share?
What should I expect, worst case? Is there a way to mitigate?Thanks much.
Jim -
We just went through this exact same change for marketing reasons. With a combination of 301 redirects and a ton of new content we found our organic dropped significantly on day one but after a period of about two weeks now things have bounced back and in some cases the new content has allowed us to rank better.
Our previous site had tons of outdated code and was not particularly clean. Pages now load much faster, the new look seems to have increased the number of pages per visit as well as time on site. If we had to do it over again tomorrow we certainly would. Sometimes not renovating the site I think costs you more in the long run.
Hope this helps.
Gary
-
Hi Jim,
Yes you actually have to do quite a bit to keep your site from losing its traction. You will most likely see a drop in rank regardless of how well you do it. The amount of time could be a day to a week if you do it right if you do it wrong it could be until you fix it or regain the links
It is not wise to lose that amount of links it will be like your site is committing suicide. Simply 301 redirect them using the information below if you cannot get the original owner of the site who links to you to link to your new domain.
When done properly you must use all the tools at your disposal to find your back links
Moz open site Explorer
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
MajesticSEO
Ahrefs
if I were you I would subscribe to the other 2 for one month in order to get the data I needed. Some people use Raven tools because it incorporates MajesticSEO for back links however I do not believe it is as good as actually using MajesticSEO
http://raventools.com/marketing-tools/seo-software/
Sost of what you need is answered in this question below.
http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch
here is a bigger version of the and photograph if it cannot be seen very well.
http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif
I strongly recommend buying the tool called screaming frog SEO spider if you're going to be the one doing this
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
combine that with the SEER interactive guide on screaming frog and the information in the URL above and you will be in good shape.
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Jim-
If there are any links in your control or from places you have a close relationship with, I would recommend updating those. However, you don't need to worry about updating the rest of the external links.
You simply need to set-up 301 redirects from the old website to the corresponding page on the new website.
oldsite.com/blue-widgets.html-> 301 to newsite.com/blue-widgets
Make sure a 301 redirect is used. Read more about redirects here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
After making the updates, you will usually see a slight loss in organic traffic that tends to recover after time. Changing websites, replacing old pages with new pages, etc are all common practices on the web. In general the search engines handle them really well when a 301 is in place.
Good luck!
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
-
Spam Links
Hi everyone, I've just joined the Moz community and after completing our first site crawl I've discovered that we have approximately 200 links with a spam score of over 50%. Should I just disavow all these links or is their a formula to deciding which links to disavow? Thanks in Advance Steve
Link Building | | StevenWalley0 -
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
What is the importance of root domains linking to your website in Google's rankings? I notice our competition has a much higher number on keywords I'm analyzing. Thank you!
I've noticed our competition has a much higher number of "root domains" linking to their page than we do. Is this simply a result of more websites linking to them? How long does it normally take to build up these numbers/rankings? (I'm assuming it's a concerted effort, which I'll be researching.) Thank you!
Link Building | | mjfinet0 -
Link value from high authority domains vs low authority domains. How big is the difference?
Hi Guys. Could you send me in the direction of some quality information on link value. i.e) How much 'link juice' do you get from high authority domains vs low authority domains. Also, I understand the Moz value for DA is logarithmic, not linear. Does this also mean that a link from a site with a really high DA would be exponentially higher value than a site with a low DA. You know....like orders of magnitude better? Cheers in advance, I love you guys 😉 Isaac.
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
Internal links
hey guys, these days should internal links within your site carry no-follow tags? or does it really matter? thanks!!
Link Building | | tm46150 -
It is ok to link together multiple domains on the same ip?
I have multiple domains (more than 50) in the same niche. All domains are on the same ip. It is ok to link them together, or to create a piramid link between them?
Link Building | | maldiniii0 -
Numerous (20K+) inbound links from ONE site in short time period
I'm somewhat new to SEO, but from what I understand, slow link growth can provide better results than highly aggressive link building campaigns. A site of mine was recently featured on a 90+ DA (55 PA) blog directory, and was featured for the entire state, therefore I received almost 20,000 inbound links from the site (from every company/listing in the state). The links have been mostly recorded (17,000) in Google webmaster tools (Yahoo Site Explorer claims around 23,000). However the site dropped 2 pages in rankings for numerous SEO related keywords since webmaster tools listed the links. Many of them are PA 50+, though a majority of the linking pages are PA 1. A few other inbound links were created from other root domains, roughly 8-10 or so in the past month. The question is, would a large amount of links like this all of a sudden trigger some kind of "penalty" from search engines (Google, especially)? And, do the PA 1 pages take away from the quality of the 55 PA links?
Link Building | | Smith-Digital0 -
High Domain Authority Even Though It has spam links to it...?
I own a domain that can provide links to my website, but it seems to have picked up a lot of spammy links - 2000+ linking domains. SeoMoz toolbar still gives it a domain authority of 66. Should I use the domain to link to my site? Or will it have a negative impact?
Link Building | | barnst0