Changing domains - best process to use?
-
I am about to move my Thailand-focused travel website into a new, broader Asia-focused travel website. The Thailand site has had a sad history with Google (algorithmic, not penalties) so I don't want that history to carry over into the new site. At the same time though, I want to capture the traffic that Google is sending me right now and I would like my search positions on Bing and Yahoo to carry through if possible.
Is there a way to make all that happen?
At the moment I have migrated all the posts over to the new domain but I have it blocked to search engines. I am about to start redirecting post for post using meta-refresh redirects with a no-follow for safety. But at the point where I open the new site up to indexing, should I at the same time block the old site from being indexed to prevent duplicate content penalties?
Also, is there a method I can use to selectively 301 redirect posts only if the referrer is Bing or Yahoo, but not Google, before the meta-refresh fires? Or alternatively, a way to meta-refresh redirect if the referrer is Google but 301 redirect otherwise? Or is there a way to "noindex, nofollow" the redirect only if the referrer is Google? Is there a danger of being penalised for doing any of these things?
Late Edit: It occurs to me that if my penalties are algorithmic (e.g. due to bad backlinks), does 301 redirection even carry that issue through to the new website? Or is it left behind on the old site?
-
Well I don't know if anyone is interested, but I thought I'd share the outcome of my site relaunch with the new domain name and expanded content coverage.
Back when I started the process, I was responding to what seemed to be an EMD penalty from Google for my domain "traveltipsthailand.com". Traffic had dropped from a peak above 500 sessions per day in July 2013 to way less than 100 sessions per day by December 2013 when I made the decision to act.
I registered a new domain "www.travelnasia.com" and redesigned the site using my master branding "Asian Travel Tips", expanding the coverage from a focus on Thailand to include China, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia (which I also enjoy travelling to). I went through every single post in the site and looked hard at what to keep and what to rewrite, restructured the content and the permalinks and re-launched on 22 December 2013.
Visitors bumbled along for quite a while at less than 100 sessions per day, with my site struggling to get a ranking in Google above #500 even for long-tail key phrases. At this stage I stupidly still had my old domain 301 redirecting URLs to the new domain. I stopped that in ear;y January and turned the old domain off - copping a drop of 50% in the already low visitor traffic.
Using Moz Pro, I've been analysing the site every week since then, tweaking and adding new content. I noticed that my images were the first content to get ranking back on Google, quickly getting up into the top #100 and even some into the top #10. This was promising, so I went back into my posts and started adding lots more images in the body content (I had tended to rely on image slider galleries up till then).
Over the past 7-8 months I've been able to see my Google rankings climbing to the point where content pages started ranking in the top #10, even on some competitive key phrases. I now have 20 key phrases ranking top #3, 51 more in the top #10, 70 more in the top #50 and 240 more outside top #50. Since early September I've started to see this reflected in Google search impressions and organic search traffic, with visitors from Google jumping from just over 200 a week to almost 800 a week in November 2014.
Overall, site visitors are now up to 3500 unique per month in November 2014 and up almost 50% from October. Nowhere near the "glory days" of July 2013, but I guess you can argue that I might have been basking in the glow of EMD advantage at that time and it would never have lasted.
So was it worth it? Yes, absolutely. It forced me to change the focus of the site, it forced me to work hard on my social media profiles, it forced me to review all the content and start adding more content. It forced me to rebuild my audience and be more thoughtful about it.
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
-
How to use Rich Snippets?
Hi there! I have been hearing a lot about Rich Snippets lately but I don't really know how they work. Are they a very important factor to consider for SEO? I would love to know your thoughts about this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lucywrites0 -
Is it best to 301 redirect or use canonical Url when consolidating two pages?
I have build several pages (A and B) with high quantity content. Page A is aged and gets lots of organic traffic, ranks for lots of valuable keywords, and has only internal links to this page. Page B is newer (6 months) and gets little traffic, ranks for no keywords, but has terrific content and many high value external links. As Page A and B are related to a similar theme, I was going to merge content from page B onto page A, but don't know which would be the best approach for handling the links going to page B. For the purposes of keep as much link equity as possible, is it best to us a 301 redirect from B to A or use a canonical URL from B to A?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Sub Domain Usage
I see that the gap uses gap.com, oldnavy.gap.com and bananarepublic.gap.com. Wouldn't a better approach for SEO to have oldnavy.com, bananarepublic.com and gap.com all separate? Is there any benefit to using the approach of store1.parentcompany.com, store2.parentcompany.com etc? What are the pros and cons to each?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81780 -
International Domains for SEO
My company is international and we have websites for each country with Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). I am in the US and I am seeing that other countries such as Costa Rica and Germany are ranking above us in search results. I thought Google automatically geo-targeted users by default and therefore I should only get .com or US results. Any idea why other countries would rank above our site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fastlaneus0 -
Subdomains and Forwarding Domains
Will someone who has experience chime in on these two issues below: Do sub-domain links which link back to the main site count as a new link from a new site; or would they be considered more of an internal link? Basically, would a sub-domain link to the main site be like a link from a unique website, or treated like any other internal link on the main site? I am speaking in terms of link juice. Should we 301 sub-domains to the main site internally? Thank you, we really appreciate any input you have!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1230 -
Cross domain canonical and hreflang
Hi Guys, So we are close to launching our new site and just need to be sure that our canonical, duplicate issues are sorted before launch. So here is our current situation. The current site is on trespass.co.uk. Then new site will be on trespass.com. The new launch is global and we will have the 3 stores within magento all in english. Trespass.com for the UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trespass
Trespass.com/US for US
Trespass.com/ROW for all other countries On trespass.com we have the following: On trespass.com/US we have the following: On trespass.com/ROW we have the following: This is how the magento developers.design company have set it up but am I right in saying the canonical tag for each store (/ROW and /US) should point to Trespass.com as the only difference is in the pricing £ $ and euros? Thanks for your help0 -
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran20780 -
Best url structure
I am making a new site for a company that services many cities. I was thinking a url structure like this, website.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/cityname1-cityname2-cityname3-cityname4-cityname5. Will this be the best approach to optimize the site for the keyword plus 5 different cities ? as long as I keep the total url characters under the SeoMoz reccomended 115 characters ? Or would it be better to build separate pages for each city, trying to reword the main services to try to avoid dulpicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90