SEO Benefit/Liability of changing URLs of a 2 year old site
-
I sell RV Parts online. Our organization is called The ROUTE 66 RV Network, so we brand everything around ROUTE 66. When we launched our store 2 years ago, we launched it with the domain:
We have a PR of 2, and we have been doing an SEO linkbuilding campaign ever since it has been around.
Our primary keyword that we are trying to rank for is RV PARTS
We also own the domain:
My question is:
Is there a significant benefit to switching our URL to RVPARTS66.COM? Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? If so, what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain?
We are in the process of a complete site overhaul which will launch in a couple weeks, so if there is ever a time to switch domains, the time is now.
Thanks!
jc
-
Do you have any kind of basis for how much it will benefit the search engine rankings?
If you were moving from "parts.com" to "carparts.com" it is likely you would see a noticeable improvement for exact match searches.
Moving from parts66.com to rvparts66.com presents a complication. Even an "rv parts" search would not be an exact match as you have the "66" included in the domain name. Your site will never have an Exact Match Domain which receives the highest benefit. Instead you would be seeking to move from a partial match domain to a better partial match domain, and the improvement may not be noticeable.
I would suggest substantial testing and research prior to making any change. I am not aware of any case studies on a change similar to the one you are considering.
-
Thanks for the response Ryan. Do you have any kind of basis for how much it will benefit the search engine rankings? A little? A lot?
I have spoken with my programmers and there is not really a technical challenge in switching domains, I am just trying to get some sort of expectation...we are currently on page 2 (~rank of 13) for RV Parts on GOogle and Bing...
What could I expect from this change?
Thanks again for your response.
jc
-
** Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? **
Yes. You will receive a benefit on all searches using that keyword.
Your current URL already has "parts" in it. By adding "rv" to the URL, your ranking will be boosted on any search for "rv" and especially for "rv parts", but you will not do as well for "parts" without "rv" anymore.
what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain?
If you decide to make the change, you should use a 301 redirect. All traffic and links will be redirected from the old site to the new site. Your links will retain 90%+ of their value for the new site. When possible, update the links so you can keep 100% of their value.
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
-
Technical URL SEO question
Hi All, We sell a product on our site which is displayed in cubic metres, from an SEO perspective is it ok to have /3m³ in the URL or should I use 3m3. Thanks All
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
URL Question: Is there any value for ecomm sites in having a reverse "breadcrumb" in the URL?
Wondering if there is any value for e-comm sites to feature a reverse breadcrumb like structure in the URL? For example: Example: https://www.grainger.com/category/anchor-bolts/anchors/fasteners/ecatalog/N-8j5?ssf=3&ssf=3 where we have a reverse categorization happening? with /level2-sub-cat/level1-sub-cat/category in the reverse order as to the actual location on the site. Category: Fasteners
Technical SEO | | ROI_DNA
Sub-Cat (level 1): Anchors
Sub-Cat (level 2): Anchor Bolts0 -
URL Structure & SEO - Should we be using sub-folders?
Hi all, As part of our content marketing efforts we have run a number of initiatives in the past and created pages on the website to go along with them (also where the links for these particular projects point to). However, the URL structure isn't actually a reflection of where the pages sit on the site. Unfortunately I'm unable to provide a URL for reasons I won't bore you with, but here's an example: We recently ran a competition that was very successful in generating links. The URL for this is www.domain.co.uk/competition. However, the page actually sits within the About Us section - which is where all of our news and content marketing pages go - and uses a URL override. How much of an issue is this in regards to A) Our SEO in general?; and B) Ensuring we receive as much equity from the links we earn as possible? A brief explanation of what URL overrides actually are would also be useful! (We have a digital marketing agency who handle most of our SEO) Thanks in advance guys! John
Technical SEO | | NAHL-14300 -
Http vs https: which is better for seo / usability
Hi All, Firstly thank you for taking the time to look. My dilemma is as follows; I have a site on wordpress that I have added an ssl certificate to and the entire domain is secure. The site has a mix of content including a blog area and product pages. My question is what does Google prefer, http or https or does it not matter As i see it my option is to keep the entire site as https and enforce this sitewide so all non secure content redirects to the https version or i could enforce https just in the cart and or product pages, all other content, homepage, blog, about us, contact us etc would be http. From an seo perspective ie google search engine, is their a best way to proceed? Finally, as i currently have http and https both displaying ie duplicate, what would be the way to fix this, i have yoast plugin so can set the canonical there and can also edit my robot.txt. I have come across this resource (http://www.creare.co.uk/http-vs-https-duplicate-content) and am wondering if this guideline is still correct or is there another more current way, if so I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction. thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Renford_Nelson0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Change in url structure - added category page
I have recently started an e-commerce website and have now changed the url structure and added another level to my category pages. So where it before was www.website.com/shirts it is now www.website.com/clothes/shirts. So I added the clothes category (just an example) before the shirt category and am now finding that the old url is still found in the search index and is still live on my site. How could this be? I use wordpress and simply change the urls in the backend. The products are still under www.website.com/product/blue-shirt-123 so they won't be affected but I suppose it now means I have duplicate category pages? So my question is: Should I 301 the the old category page (www.website.com/shirts)to the new url (www.website.com/clothes/shirts). And how can the old url still be live on my site? If this was a bit unclear, please let me know. Appreciate your replies!
Technical SEO | | bitte0 -
Correct Redirect method for switching pages from .html to /pretty urls/
I have a customer that has all his site files as .html extensions and i'm going to rebuild this site into a wordpress site for easier management, regarding the new permalink structure, should i just do a 301 redirect on this?
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0