Changing domains from .net to .com after 7 month of traffic loss.
-
We are in business since 2005 and we always used the .net version as it was the only one available when we started. In about 2007 we bought the .com version to the person who owned it but we kept using the .net as customers were already used to that version.
In January we started to see a SE traffic loss, not to mention being outranked by several sites (95% of those site spammers). We had no manual penalty but it could be an algorithmic, we are not sure if we even have some sort of penalty or is just that our niche is too spammed.
We are now considering moving the site to the .com version as all our tries of increasing and regaining our ranks were useless (backlink cleanup, disavow tool usage, excellent link building, excellent content creation and social interactions). Our DA and PA are both higher that any of the other ages ranking on top. We have about 3k pages indexed.
What do you guys think? Should we move the site to the .com? (note that the change is ranking-wise, not in terms of branding).
And if we do, should we 301 all pages? or rel=canonical to avoid a possible "penalty flow" to the other domain?
Note: for years, the .com version was/is 301 to the .net one.
Thank you all!
-
Hello Federico,
There are enough tag pages still indexed that I'd go ahead and remove that entire directory in Google Webmaster Tools. You may consider a noindex tag on archive pages as well.
In regard to your original question, I don't think it would necessarily remove an algorithmic penalty, but it would be good for your brand in the long run. If you're going to do a change like that you might as well do it while traffic is low anyway.
Yes, 301 redirect the .net site to the .com site on a page-by-page basis.
I would also look into creating a few more useful non-blog pages on the site. Some type of innovative resource that advertisers and/or publishers would find super useful would help you build up the authority of the main site, which would be important considering how relatively few pages and links you have there compared to the blog. An inforgraphic wouldn't cut the mustard, but I'm sure you can come up with something since it is a very well-done site visually.
-
There's been a lot of chatter about changing domains when there's no manual penalty and some claim it worked pretty well.
All tag pages are set to noindex, so if some are still showing that's because Google hasn't removed them yet or even still indexing them. It isn't a wordpress theme either, it is an in-house designed and programmed website, including the blog.
-
Hi,
if you were doing 301 redirect (permanent) from the COm to the NET, don't change that. According to me, it will not change anything.
I have quickly checked your website and sure, you have a lot of pages indexed but it's 70% of Wordpress Tag pages; useless pages.
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
-
Large traffic loss, how to resolve?
So I have a few questions. A site which has dropped quite dramatically over the last month. There could be a few factors (less regular updates) been one. However, plenty of links spam has happened which some of which appears to be been pointed at an article. That article has been removed. We also disavowed 800+ links all of which had a spam score of between 100 and 40+ - they all looked ugly and irreverent such as forum spams, wallpapers spams, and junk. Is this the right move to make? What should the site do next? The current score is 4,000 SEMR. It was around 15,000 before. It's an aged site. Less effort is put into it now as the next site is here. Await your replys thanks. 3BCQNi3
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
Does google sandbox aged domains too?
Hello, i have a question. Recently i bought a domain from godaddy auction which is 23 years old and have DA 37 PA 34 Before bidding i check out the domain on google using this query to make sure if pages of this website are showing or not (site:mydomain.com) only home page was indexed on google. Further i check the domain on archive web the domain was last active in 2015. And then it parked for long about 4 years. So now my question does google consider these type of domain as new or will sandboxed them if i try to rebuild them and rank for other niche keywords ? Because its been 4 weeks i have been building links to my domain send several profile and social signals to my domain. My post is indexed on google but not showing in any google serp result.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Steven231 -
Buying a domain vs. renting a domain
I am considering buying and redirecting a domain that has a pretty strong, relevant link profile. However, it's very expensive. There is another option to rent the domain on a month-to-month basis. I am interested in doing this for at least a month just to see what SEO benefits are to be had and if it would ultimately be worth buying or not. Can renting a domain have any negative impacts on my primary site? Would the search engines know if I did this? Is there any harm in having those redirects appear and then disappear?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is: If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank? Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data? Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu0 -
Changes to SEO with disavow?
Has the game changed a lot with the disavow tool I can see people still saying check out what our competitors are doing but with just going through a disavow myself how do you actually know what the correct link diversity is as 0 - 100% of the links could be disavowed. Also could a competitor not just buy a load of spammy links and disavow them to mask there real links. (I know in my backlinks on 150 are good and the rest is disavowed crap)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Owning multiple domains across similar fields
We have a printing website specializing in a single field but had added other products to it along the way, we are looking at adding a second site (redesigned from the ground up) that with cover everything (so will inevitably cover some of the same keywords) is this ok. We are considering some of the other things such as putting both sites on different IP's and also wondered about the registration details (would it be ok to have them under the same company?). Just to make it clear they will not be used for cross link or any other such things so just wanting to know if they could end up on page one for some of the same keywords and Google would be ok with this. Thank you for your time.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Will aggregating external content hurt my domain's SERP performance?
Hi, We operate a website that helps parents find babysitters. As a small add- on we currently run a small blog with the topic of childcare and parenting. We are now thinking of introducing a new category to our blog called "best articles to read today". The idea is that we "re-blog" selected articles from other blogs that we believe are relevant for our audience. We have obtained the permission from a number of bloggers that we may fully feature their articles on our blog. Our main aim in doing so is to become a destination site for parents. This obviously creates issues with regard to duplicated content. The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance? And if so, how can this effect be avoided? It isn't important for us that these "featured" articles rank in SERPs, so we could potentially make them "no index" sites or make the "rel canonical" point to the original author. Any thoughts anyone? Thx! Daan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | daan.loening0 -
Is domain name or page title "safe" as anchor text?
I am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0