Moving from a .org to a .com

[movieguide]

We have been a .org website for as long as the web as been around. We just recently got the .com for our organization and wondered what the transition process would be like. We offer a lot of content to help parents with parenting and so as a content driven site we have about 13k external links and 1,200 linking root domains links to our site. Will we loose all our links in the transition to the .com? Is there a way to do this well that helps our brand and also retains our google ranking? Thanks so much for any and all help.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

If you have the potential to acquire movieguide.com, that's a great domain name. That said, you're right that this is a crazy competitive space and some of the competitors are giants like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes!

One option is to buy the .com and redirect it to the .org. If you engage in offline advertising (magazines, on the subway, etc.), you could use the .com because it does look more professional. You could have the .org continue to be the resolving website, after the .com is 301 redirected.

We are always hesitant to recommend redirection (especially of an entire domain) if you don't have to due to the risk of lost rankings. The rankings are usually not too hard to get back, but it's never a sure thing.

[JaneCopland]

Hi,

CleverPhD has a great response, but I wanted to add specifically that if you do this move, you will not lose the authority of those 13k links / 1,200 linking domains if you do the 301 redirection process properly. The guides linked to in CleverPhD's comment will help.

301 redirects pass the majority of authority from one URL to another, but you may also want to create a list of the top linking websites from that 1,200 and contact them after you have completed the move, asking them to update their links to you. This will ensure that you retain your best links on top of properly redirecting all the others.

[CleverPhD]

Question - why move to the .com?  If you are a non-profit, you want to stay .org and just redirect the .com to your .org.

If you are moving to the .com, it would be like any other domain name move.  The key, you need to really plan your move and make sure you have your 301 redirects in place that is specific as possible for all of your old pages pointing to new pages.  In other words, don't redirect everything to your new home page.  Ideally, your redirects should be 1 to 1.  Old page A on .org redirects to New page A on .com.  Old page B on .org redirects to New page B on .com.  Rinse repeat for as many pages as you have.  Yes, it is tedious, but yes worth it if you do want to retain your traffic and rankings.  The more work you do prior to the switch the better.

I would advise you to read everything about the Moz migration from SEOMoz

http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/

Also, lots of Domain Name Transfer - Site Transfer Type Checklists

http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/29/big-content-site-migration-tips/

Good luck!