Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?
-
I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name.
Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com
OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains)
NEW one is curently on 0
The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name.
this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible??
A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O
B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content?
Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases.
Thanks!
-
Hi Tamir,
Matt has already done a great job in answering this and I would add just a small side note - my guess for the new domain came from someone reading that keyword matching between domains and content was a great way to get better results in SERPs. It's antiquated thinking but that's what it looks like (adding "travel" to the domain in the hopes that potential customers would better understand what they were all about).
As Matt said, the big issue is the way the redirects were handled (should be 301'd to a similar site structure for the smallest possible rankings impact). If you were to create a site structure similar to that found on the previous site, you would probably see a return to those traffic levels (or close) fairly quickly. Another method might be to re-institute the previous site by reloading the site map on the old domain (there are tools for this). This would permit you to use the old site until you could get a proper site structure set up for the new one.
You don't have to move back to the previous website permanently, but it wouldn't be a bad idea until to have sorted out what you want to do with the new site moving forward. A properly-executed 301 redirect should cost you between 1-3% of your overall link juice.
Hope this helps a bit.
Rob
-
The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.
As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect - this old Q&A you might find interesting.
http://moz.com/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect
If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.
Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/
I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.
On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.
Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps
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
-
Old brand name being suffixed on Google SERP listings
At the end of some of our listings in Google search results pages, our old brand name is being suffixed even though it is not in our title tags. For context, we re-branded several months ago, and at that time also migrated to a new domain name. Our title tags have our current brand name suffixed, like "Shop Example Category | Example©". In the Google search results, but not in Bing nor Yahoo, about half of our pages have titles whcih instead look like this: "Shop Example Category | Example© - oldBrandName". The "dash" and the old brand name are not in our title tags, but they are being appended, even when our title tags are fairly long. For example, even with titles at 54 characters (421 pixels), the suffix is being appended. BUT, not with our longer title tags. We are actually OK with the brand name being appended if our title tags are on the shorter side, but would prefer that our current brand name be appended instead of the older one. I realize we could increase the length of all our title tags, and perhaps we may go that route. But, does anyone know where Google would be getting the old brand name to append onto the URLs? We've checked and it is not in our page source (the old brand name is used in our page source in some areas of text and some url paths, but not in any kind of meta tag). Per Google's guidance (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-do-not-put-organization-schema-markup-on-every-page/289981/) we only have schema for the "Organization" on our home page, and not on every page. So, assuming this advice is correct to not add schema to every page, how can we inform Google of our current brand name so that it stops appending our old brand name on pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoelevated0 -
Can a .ly domain rank in the United States?
Hello members. I have a question that I am seeking to confirm whether or not I am on the right track. I am interested in purchasing a .ly domain which is the ccTLD for Libya. The purpose of the .ly domain would be for branding purposes however at the same time I do not want to kill the websites ability to rank in Google.com (United States searches) because of this domain. Google does not consider .ly to be one of those generic ccTLDs like. io, .cc, .co, etc. that can rank and Bitly has also moved away from the .ly extension to a .com extension. Back in 2011 when there was unrest in Lybia, a few well known sites that utilized the .ly extension had their domains confiscated such as Letter.ly, Advers.ly and I think Bitly may have been on that list too however with the unrest behind us it is possible to purchase a .ly so being able to obtain one is not an issue. From what I can tell, I should be able to specify in Google Search Console that the website utilizing the .ly extension is a US based website. I can also do this with Google My Business and I will keep the Whois info public so the whois data can been seen as a US based website. Based on everything I just said do any of you think I will be OK if I were to register and use the .ly domain extension and still be able to rank in Google.com (US Searches). Confirmation would help me sleep better. Thanks in advance everyone and have a great day!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemaresca0 -
Does having multiple Domain aliases hurt SEO rank ?
Our company having multiple domain aliases (DIfferent TLD) like example.com, .net, .org, .club, .win to one site (Same Content). We do this because our country ISP is blocking a few of the domain aliases. Question: Does this hurt the SEO rank? What approach is the best for us to gain SEO Rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | missionunpossible0 -
What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?
Hi, Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info. The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months. Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter. Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name? Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others. But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches. At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Does a dash in your domain name effect your ranking?
Does a dash in your domain name effect your ranking? or it dosen't really matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Radomski0 -
How to deal with competition with a similar domain name as my client website?
How can I deal with other websites that have a keyword domain name similar to my client website? I get a few domains similar to my client domain name just to avoid the same issue, but there are a few others ranking for the same keywords and I don't want posible customers get confused with a similar domain name. I have social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and etc), but they are not ranking on the first page. This is the situation: www.domain.com that would be my client's domain. And the competition: www.bestdomain.com www.thedomain.com www.domaincomapany.com And a few more. At this time my client is ranking #1 position, but all the others ar 1 or 2 positions bellow.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0