New domain name for existing site
-
Hi all,
Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL.
After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche?
Thanks for any input.
Kind regards.
Edit 11:38
The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement.
The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
-
If you goal is to 301 all the pages of the new site to the old one, I would suggest to make the new site with the right pages for the different search terms you target, let it be indexed and ranked, get a few backlinks to keep the domain somehow "visible" to google. This process should take a couple of months.
Once this is done, create a redirect script on the new site.
If you want to rank deep pages of the old site, the script should redirect user to the page of the old site which correspond the best with the new site page.
If you want to rank the homepage of the old site, just redirect all requests to this homepage.
-
I am not sure why you are 301ing your site? Do you mean canonicalizing back to the old domain?
If you have www.OldDomain.com and www.NewDomain.com with NewDomain.com having fresh content that links back to OldDomain.com, then I would add a natural link back to OldDomain.com
If you are reposting duplicate content, then canonicalizing the page back to the old site is recommended.
Personally (without looking at your real setup), I would set the new site on its own, get all the social buzz and such generating visitors to the new site as you are intending, then link back to the old site as naturally required.
Old site sells coffee while new site is a coffee fan site.
Let the new site generate inbound links and visitors naturally by way of being strictly a fan site talking about coffee. Then when you mention Kona Coffee, you link that back to your store's Kona Coffee landing page.
You will generate Page Authority for the new site naturally, and then push that juice to the store with excellent anchor text. And you should also link out to other sites of relevance, although not stores in this case : )
Hope that helps
-
You could add an index.html on the new domain making sure you have your primary keyword in your title tag. Let the site be indexed and then 301 it to your homepage. Obviously, if the keyword in the title tag is more relevant to a subfolder then 301 it to that subfolder.
-
Hey tgraham,
Personally I don't see any objections to sending the traffic from the new url to a subfolder on the old domain. Since this page will probably be more relevant to your redirected visitors than your home page, your visitors will have a better user experience this way as well.
Kind regards,
TheoPS: I presume you're aware of the fact that this way of utilizing the new domain will keep it from ranking in the search engines? By using a 301 redirect only the old domain will rank, not the new one.
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
-
Site Name as displayed in serp is a completely random company in an entirely different industry!
Hello! I am looking at a site that has its site name displayed incorrectly in the SERPS. The site name is showing as a company from the airline industry while the site in question provides hypnotherapy services. This issue is on every page except the homepage. I have checked source code and the structured data. Local business structured data with the correct company name - I can't find anything at all in the source code that refers to this random airline! Thank you for reading this and for any ideas or suggestions! Here is a screenshot that illustrates the issueUntitled.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sean.e0 -
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301 redirects or will search engines know to remove the old 404 pages from the SERPs? We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrandOptimizations0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Site re-design, full site domain A/B test, will we drop in rankings while leaking traffic
We are re-launching a client site that does very well in Google. The new site is on a www2 domain which we are going to send a controlled amount of traffic to, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% to 100% over a 5 week period. This will lead to a reduction in traffic to the original domain. As I don't want to launch a competing domain the www2 site will not be indexed until 100% is reached. If Google sees the traffic numbers reducing over this period will we drop? This is the only part I am unsure of as the urls and site structure are the same apart from some new lower level pages which we will introduce in a controlled manner later? Any thoughts or experience of this type of re-launch would be much appreciated. Thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leshonk0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Moving Entire Domain to New Site with New File Extensions
I have been looking for a while for a good an clear Step by Step guide for moving a site from an old to a new domain... so I guess a good discussion here, could help many web masters have a smooth transition. So in your opinion, beside the obvious, what are the most important steps you must take? Here is what I do: 1. 301 old site to new one and TEST.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dhidalgo1
2. Check Internal Links - Double Check for 404's.
3. Update your Social Profiles with new URL.
4. Let GWT and BWT of the change and request a Crawl.
5. Contact as Many of Webmaster as you possibly can to point your links to your new domain. What's missing? What have you found helpful and/or Effective?0 -
Should we get a new domain that has our main keyword in it.
We have been running our site about 10 years under the domain www.islesurfboards.com and we are referred as "Isle Surfboards" when linked to in the anchor text. Our core product line and keyword focus has always been on "surfboards" and its related long tail keywords. However in the last several years we have began to sell "paddle boards" and now they have become our best selling product accouting for 80% of our business. We really want to rank well for "paddleboards" and related words but noticed we always seem to fall below people who have websites with "paddleboard" or "sup" in the domain and company name. will they always rank better unless we also inlcude it in ours? Should we move to a New Domain that focuses on the new target keyword "paddleboard" or a combo of both "surfboards" and "paddleboards"and would this make any difference or even hurt us since it would be a new domain. Then in addition rebrand our company name to include surfboards and/or paddleboards in the company name or some combo of both so the anchor text when people who refer to us relate to both paddle boards and surfboards?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
How to retain link juice moving to new site, cms and servers?
We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site. We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to. What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site? Example This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:> We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example: How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice? Any thoughts most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590