Thoughts on my change of address delima?
-
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains.
- internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website)
- companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website)
We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that.
My main concerns...
- From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case?
- As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we?
- Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts?
This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
-
This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch. That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do:
- GWT change of address
- 301 Redirection
- New links at time of redirection pointing to new site.
All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.
-
Can we put a percentage on 301 link dilution? We can't stay on the current domain so the question becomes what is the recovery time of newdomain.com (with Webmaster Tool site transfer) vs us.internationalcompany.com?
P.S. Thank you both for the continued responses.
-
Hi Tyler. Here's another case study that might give you some ideas about what you decide: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. From that example, you can see all the factors they took into consideration before combining the two. If it's great enough, you might convince the Corporate Website that it could be worth it.
As for the DA of a subdomain, that's not quite right. While the DA of internationalcompany.com won't be affected by the creation of us.internationalcompany.com, us.internationalcompany.com will start out as a new site. With the 301 redirection from your old domain to the new, it should pick up strength quickly, but it won't mirror the DA of the parent company's root domain. You can check this with PA comparisons of many sites that are hosted on subdomains as companies like wordpress and tumblr offer. Whatever you decide it looks like you'll need solid by in from corporate if you're working off of their servers so that you can address things like the robots.txt file, adding GWT verification code, and so on.
As a technical note, you can point a subdomain at a unique IP address by using an A Name instead of a cname in DNS. This means that us.internationalcompany.com could point at your servers as long as they have a static IP. That would give you more flexibility in working with file transfers, code and the like.
-
- The company outsourced the website to a 3rd party development company. My team has been told by the corporate office that the dev company owns the code and servers that the website resides on and we're simply using what they were paid to develop for us. To get the access that we want we'd have to buy the code and from what I've gathered it won't come cheap.
- That sounds comforting. So in this scenario a strong emphasis on establishing proper 301's and maintaining page authority should leave us in a better position than when we started?
-
Re: 1- Tough call. Why can't someone have access to the main site?
Re: 2- Subdomains now have the same DA as the rest of the domain.
Re: 3- Great company to study,
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
-
Hold Off on SEO Changes After Domain Migration?
We migrated our domain on April 4th. Our domain authority has dropped from 22 to 8. Traffic is down from 90 visits a day to 10. Search console has indexed about 120 out of 600 pages. I have been told it may take several months to recovers some element of domain authority. My SEO consultant has planned on implementing the following changes immediately: 1. Change in URL structure
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Build internal links (my site has very few).
3. Optimize URLs for specific keywords
4. Keyword optimization of URLs using Yoast.
5. Modify Schema Do we risk confusing Google further by making these changes until are domain authority and traffic has recovered? Is it safe to proceed with some "softer" changes such building internal links and keyword optimizing text whicl avoiding more disruptive changes such as re-writing URLs? Are we better off focusing on off site ranking factors such as link building and local SEO until domain authority recovers? How about only adding new content to the site such as blog posts and listings? To complicate matters the site is old and dated and we are working on a new UX design. So perhaps it would be better to launch the new UX at the exact same time as the onsite SEO optimization occurs. This could be less work and less disruptive. At the same time I would very much like to enjoy benefits of optimizing SEO now. Any thoughts????? Also, my domain migration has killed traffic. It is very concerning!! Is a 90% drop in traffic normal in the first ten days!? Thanks everyone!!!
Alan1 -
Community Discussion: What changes are you seeing as a result of Penguin 4.0?
We've been waiting on the latest Penguin rollout so long it would have been appropriate for Google to launch it with a creepy meme titled "I'm baaack." But now that it's here, what changes are you seeing to the websites you monitor or manage? We'd very much enjoy hearing you stories, thoughts and proposed courses of action below in the comments. If you need to get up to speed on Penguin 4.0, Dr. Pete's post, Penguin 4.0: Was it Worth the Wait?, is a great place to start, as is the latest Whiteboard Friday by Rand: Penguin 4.0: How the Real-Time Penguin-in-the-Core-Alg Model Changes SEO. RS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ronell-smith3 -
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
How to switch brand domain and address previous use of domain
We recently acquired a new domain to replace existing as it better fits our brand. We have little/no organic value on existing domain so switching is not an issue. However the newly acquired domain was previously used in a different industry and has inbound links with significant spam scores. How can we let Google know that these links are not valid for our business and start rebuilding reputation of the domain? Disavow tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marlette0 -
Domain remains the same IP address is changing on same server only last 3 digits changing. Will this effect rankings
Dear All, We have taken and a product called webacelator from our hosting UKfast and our ip address is changing. UKFasts asked to point DNS to different IP in order to route the traffic through webacelator, which will enhance browsing speed. I am concerned, will this change effect our rankings. Your responses highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
(Australia) Changing .net.au to .com.au - web dev is refusing to do a 301 redirect and wants to run two sites?
After years using a .net.au site, my client has purchased the .com.au version of the same domain. I've now set up a new, responsive website using a wordpress template with new content, but used a similar page structure. I've asked their web developer to now do a 301 permanent redirect on each old page from .net.au site to it's new .com.au page, but he has refused, saying it would be bad for long term SEO. Instead, he says they should run both sites (which I thought would cause duplicate content issues). Both domains are hosted with the same company. I thought as long as the 301 redirects were done on a page by page basis, there were no issues? I'm no SEO expert, (which he claims to be), so I just wanted to get another opinion on what best practice would be in this instance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carolineraad0 -
Retaining SEO value when changing the shopping cart software
I am looking into purchasing an existing ecommerce site with high SEO rankings. However, the site is old and beyond outdated. The shopping cart would need to be updated (say, to Magento). However, an updated shopping cart will force a change in the URLs (from example.com/category.asp to example.com/category). Will the SEO value be lost? Does anyone have any experience with this issue? There is a significant amount of money for me at stake so I would really appreciate to hear your experiences in this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ywsw0 -
Separate IP Address for Blog
Our developers are recommending we sign up for a cloud based LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP) server to install 3<sup>rd</sup> party software (Wordpress). They said "the blog will be on a separate IP address and potentially can have some impact with SEM/SEO." Can anyone expand on what impact this might have versus having it on the same IP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0