Considering Moving to New Domain and SEO
-
Hello,
One of our sites has been using a domain since 2005 and is shown below. The domain is terrible for multiple reasons, hyphens and doesn't even reflect our actual company name. Not to mention its embarrassing when telling a customer to email us at support @ pro "dash, yes the hyphen" gift.... I wanted to change it long ago but feared it would hurt my SEO rankings. After taking Bruce Clay's training class back in 2004, we managed to rank top 10 for most targeted keywords. My ranking have slowly dropped over time due to neglect and decaying IBL's. We still rank for a few targeted keywords but it was just August of 2017 we were still top 10 but something happened and we dropped out of the top 100 right before our holiday season. We had to run Adwords and BingAds to supplement traffic this holiday season. So I am wondering before I restart my SEO efforts should I move the domain now before trying to build new content, IBL's, etc?
I was always under the impression Google used domain trust a major factor which wasnt only IBL but also domain age. Our preferred domain I purchased from another owner and it has ZERO links to it. It was basically a parked domain with the "domain for sale" stuff. I am a little nervous about moving it over because Google didnt even have it in its index. I put up a coming soon page and hosted it on my server, same C Block, and requested a crawl from my webmaster console. I added some text to the new domain index page and it appears Google is showing results for our old domain! At first I thought it was duplicate content but its not Google obviously has deciphered current site is my old domain and is displaying the title and meta data from the old domain. I have never seen this before. Google cache shows the current domain the new domain url.
A few questions:
Will my site get sandboxed after 301 redirecting and going webmaster console move features etc?
Does this reset the trust factors? I have read examples in my research where some people say it only took a few weeks and everything was back to normal and others that have said it took years.
Any experience or insight is greatly appreciated. I am currently relearning SEO and going over the SEO tutorial articles provided on moz. Thanks again!
New Domain - matches our company name, no hyphens, better branding
http://www.giftbasketpros.com/
Google index
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.giftbasketpros.com
Current Domain, since 2005, has ranked well for years until this summer
-
Isn't done yet. It takes much time to get you back to the old ranking but not sure to be said. It will return 100%. Its same thing I did try on Branches You can check also.
-
I think the miscommunication was from my original post where I posted "Does domain trust reset" I can see how someone would read that as trying to circumvent a penalty. I meant on a new domain with no history and no index. My current domain whether its penalized or not has ranked for years so I am very confident this issue can be resolved.
My first step is learning about the disavow tool. I have never used it but did notice a big quantity of links which according aHrefs was discovered in August. 691 to be exact on August 17th by some spam blog. I did not buy or ask for those links. I am assuming the disavow tool was made for this type of spam. I will review my Google backlinks first and disavow any garbage then update my content and try to build good links to it.
There are many things I need to do, years behind. My site isnt even mobile ready yet. That project is slated to be finished by March.
-
Hi,
I am so sorry that a general advice was offensive for you.
You know best what caused what.
I apologize too, on regard a quote I did not translate properly for you. -
Thanks for the response.
I was not saying I wanted to move the domain to somehow circumvent some penalty. When I asked about trust I was referring to the new domain with zero history not some bad link scheme on my current site.
My drop in rankings has been a slow and gradual drop from #1 to #18ish over the last 8 years. The recent blackhole drop could be anything but I think I would remember some shady link scheme you are insinuating. No, I didnt participate in link schemes in the past nor in the current. I havent kept up to date with the current SEO stuff but I highly doubt sites with such bad link schemes would have survived penguin years ago. This drop is just a couple months ago well beyond the big algo changes so I highly doubt its some bad stuff coming home to roost as you suggest.
Also I am not sure what you are talking about with regards to water under the bridge and the whole flood???
If anything my IBL have decayed over time by the apparent Ahrefs chart. The sudden drop, I will figure out what it is but its not what you are suggesting.
-
Hi,
As you already noticed on regard SEO, it is not water which passed under the bridge, since 2004, it was a whole flood!
Said that, I strongly recommend that you update the SEO of your old domain before consider a migration or a redirect.
Nowadays, Google knows a lot about the owner of any domain. That is a factor too.All succesfull migrations bring almost all the SEO rank, whether is a good or a bad one. If your website is now having a penalization due to old back links, link schemes from the past that you might have forgotten or you do not know about, lack of h1: the best option is to fix up all the SEO issues, accordingly to SEO 2018 best practices, before the migration or redirect.
Sadly, Google has long term excelent memory and great data bank. Good luck and Happy New Year!
Mª Verónica
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
-
My question is in regards to possible conflict in creating an additional website under a new domain for our company.
Our companies, Vulcan Information Packaging and ATC both live under the domain “www.binders.com”. This is a great thing as far as us dominating in the binder industry. However, in the next 2-3 years and forward, we want to build our presence as a company who offers packaging products such as boxes, marketing kits, and other forms of packaging. Obviously, the “binders.com” brand/domain does not contribute much to this effort and can be confusing to customers visiting the site. Essentially, we want to build an additional branding for our company in the packaging industry. Keeping this in mind, we own the domain “www.vulcaninformationpackaging.com” and we are considering building a new website using this domain which contains the word “packaging”. This new site would only promote and contain packaging related products. This new website will advertise and direct traffic to our company Vulcan Information Packaging, which is the same company “binders.com” directs traffic to. So my question is to determine whether doing this might be a practice that Google and other search engines might frown upon. I tend to think it will be fine because we will be promoting and driving traffic for non-binder products where as, binders.com is heavily in binder related products. thank you, Dominic Zaidan
Branding | | dzaidan0 -
Multiple Google+ pages when entering new foreign markets?
We are a medium size business on our way to expanding to new countries. Right now we have one Google+ account in Denmark. When expanding to more markets outside of Denmark, should we then set up a Google+ page for each country? Or is it better to stick with the one we have? Thanks in advance!
Branding | | miegt0 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword?
My client has a website (brandname.co.in) The website is popular in India (we show up 1st in SERP for our brand name as the search query in Google India) but results are different in Google US, Actually we are not even in the top 10 results in the US version of Google SERP. The Domain name (brandname**.com**) is already taken by another person and he isn't using the domain but expects around $100000 for selling the domain. So we are only left with the option of buying another domain name. My client provides business intelligence consulting services/solutions. What I would like to know is can I recommend buying (brandname-bianalytics.com)? Would this be treated as keyword stuffing? Is there a possibility that my website be penalized by EDM algorithm updates for my primary keyword(bi analytics)? Please advise.
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Best use for a second domain?
Hi, I have a client who has a website with its brand name in its URL and this is not very keyword friendly as it is just numbers http://www.44-16.com/ -- the website has been up for a few months and is starting to see it traffic increase (mainly due to PPC). The client has told me that they also have another URL which is directly relevant to the industry they are in and they have asked me for advice on the best way to use the second domain. Would it be best to create a second website that has several links to the main site (although new content, not duplicated content) or would a blog be the best option for the new site? The existing site does have a blog that generates some good traffic so they'd have to be writing two blogs I assume? The client doesn't want to stop using the first site and I want to give them the best advice to make the best use of this second domain. Thanks!
Branding | | bendyman0 -
Competitors' dummy websites --- What SEO (or other?) strategy is this?
I work for an e-retailer. I've noticed that at least one of our competitors (and, I think, a second as well) has set up a neutral "third party" website that attempts to provide unbiassed information about different manufacturer's products. Of course, their products always win out over the competitor in these comparisons. But this one site (and another whose corporate backer I can't seem to figure out) is keyworded so poorly, and not branded at all. There are very few (if any) links to the corporate sponsor, or links, period. It's definitely not serving to have "Little Brand x" appear next to "Big Brand Y" in search results, either (again, really poorly keyworded). Other SEO seems really minimal. What do you think their strategy is? Is it a dumb waste o' money or something really smart that I'm not picking up on? Your insights most appreciated!
Branding | | Novos_Jay1 -
Are templates considered duplicate content?
We have a line of products that are all using the same template or shell for a website structure. All have different content relating to a specific product or service, but being its a line of different products under one family, we use the same colors and template structure for consistency and branding purposes. It was just brought to my attention that using a template like this across multiple sites could raise duplicate content flags as google is reading the same template code and may not differentiate that its a family product line of sites. Does anyone have any feedback on whether this could be true or not?
Branding | | anthonytjm0 -
Impact on Global SEO of Losing One Regional Site
Hi, Plans are in place to have an affiliate company take over the marketing, sale, and distribution of our products in one region of the 35 that we currently operate in. The regional site is responsible for 10% of our overall global traffic. 26% of the revenue to that specific site comes from organic search traffic. The question is whether the loss of this traffic and these pages will have any negative impact on our global SEO status?
Branding | | Corel0 -
New Social Media Site + META Tags for User Profiles
I'm currently in the process of building a social media site and was deciding whether or not to add META descriptions/keywords for individual user profiles. After reviewing Facebook, I noticed that in the META Description field, user profile pages just inherited the values for Facebook (there were no META keywords); and, when I reviewed LinkedIn, there was no META description/keywords at all. After this investigation, I figured it might be a question best addressed to the SEO community. With that, what do you guys think? If you were building a social media site, would you have META description + META keywords for each user's profile? If so, what would be the best way to optimize the individual profiles so they rank highly within the search engines?
Branding | | NiallSmith0