Moving from a .org to a .com
-
We have been a .org website for as long as the web as been around. We just recently got the .com for our organization and wondered what the transition process would be like. We offer a lot of content to help parents with parenting and so as a content driven site we have about 13k external links and 1,200 linking root domains links to our site. Will we loose all our links in the transition to the .com? Is there a way to do this well that helps our brand and also retains our google ranking? Thanks so much for any and all help.
-
Hi there,
If you have the potential to acquire movieguide.com, that's a great domain name. That said, you're right that this is a crazy competitive space and some of the competitors are giants like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes!
One option is to buy the .com and redirect it to the .org. If you engage in offline advertising (magazines, on the subway, etc.), you could use the .com because it does look more professional. You could have the .org continue to be the resolving website, after the .com is 301 redirected.
We are always hesitant to recommend redirection (especially of an entire domain) if you don't have to due to the risk of lost rankings. The rankings are usually not too hard to get back, but it's never a sure thing.
-
Hi,
CleverPhD has a great response, but I wanted to add specifically that if you do this move, you will not lose the authority of those 13k links / 1,200 linking domains if you do the 301 redirection process properly. The guides linked to in CleverPhD's comment will help.
301 redirects pass the majority of authority from one URL to another, but you may also want to create a list of the top linking websites from that 1,200 and contact them after you have completed the move, asking them to update their links to you. This will ensure that you retain your best links on top of properly redirecting all the others.
-
Question - why move to the .com? If you are a non-profit, you want to stay .org and just redirect the .com to your .org.
If you are moving to the .com, it would be like any other domain name move. The key, you need to really plan your move and make sure you have your 301 redirects in place that is specific as possible for all of your old pages pointing to new pages. In other words, don't redirect everything to your new home page. Ideally, your redirects should be 1 to 1. Old page A on .org redirects to New page A on .com. Old page B on .org redirects to New page B on .com. Rinse repeat for as many pages as you have. Yes, it is tedious, but yes worth it if you do want to retain your traffic and rankings. The more work you do prior to the switch the better.
I would advise you to read everything about the Moz migration from SEOMoz
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/
Also, lots of Domain Name Transfer - Site Transfer Type Checklists
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/29/big-content-site-migration-tips/
Good luck!
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
-
Anyone have a good process for Schema.org auditing?
I am looking to do a Schema.org audit across a large number of websites that all run on the same platform. I'm not really sure where to start and what format to use for a deliverable. I suppose starting by checking for errors on the current schema and documenting them and then moving on to additional schema that could be added to the JSON+LD? My last structured data audit I just used a spreadsheet and it didn't come out as neat as I would have liked. Anyone who has some experience in this, your input would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Is there any benefit of having a .tv tld instead of a .com for a video centric website?
We are launching a video dense website. Is there any evidence that having a .tv tld can help with video optimization? We are trying to find proof that Google looks at a .tv tld favorably for video SEO as opposed to a .tv website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Client has moved to secured https webpages but non secured http pages are still being indexed in Google. Is this an issue
We are currently working with a client that relaunched their website two months ago to have hypertext transfer protocol secure pages (https) across their entire site architecture. The problem is that their non secure (http) pages are still accessible and being indexed in Google. Here are our concerns: 1. Are co-existing non secure and secure webpages (http and https) considered duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications
2. If these pages are duplicate content should we use 301 redirects or rel canonicals?
3. If we go with rel canonicals, is it okay for a non secure page to have rel canonical to the secure version? Thanks for the advice.0 -
We are moving one website to a different domain and would like to know what is the best way to do it without hurting SEO
The website we want to move, let's say www.olddomain.com has a low quality back links profile, in fact it received a manual notification from google of unnatural links detected; but the home page has a PR 3. We want to move it to a different domain let's say www.newdomain.com. We would like to know if it's better to do a 301 redirect to the new domain, in order to transfer the link juice or if it would be better to do a 302, taking into account that this redirect won't pass any link juice, so it would be like start from scratch with this new domain. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Redirect 1 specific link from a referrer, wise move?
This might be a bit of a complex question as it has many implications and I’d really appreciate some expert advice. I have a client who has one specific .gov link which is absolutely amazing. It doesn’t have any anchor text and goes straight to the homepage. However it drives quite a lot of revenue! It’s lovely as SEO’s to think of links actually driving revenue rather than assisting rankings of course. Over the last 30 days this single govt. link has driven: 418 clicks, 61 conversions, $7,500 revenue Not bad I hear you say! J I really want to extract maximum value from this and I’ sure it would perform far better if it went to a really tightly focused landing page rather than the homepage. It really is hyper-targeted buyer traffic (as the stats show) but could perform even better in my opinion. I can’t change the link, that’s not possible unfortunately. However I can do some server side stuff to redirect traffic from just this link to a desired new page. However, what are the SEO implications of this in the opinion of some of the experts here? Obviously the link itself is valuable from an SEO perspective and I don’t want to lose that. I’m not sure how Google would treat the link if this were to be done. Also I really want to A/B test the homepage versus a landing page to ensure that it really does give an improvement. I’m not even sure how to achieve that given the difficulty in this situation. Any advice would really be useful! Thanks J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarveyP0 -
Does anyone else have issues with atomysolutions.com?
Nearly all of my domains in webmaster tools show thousands of links to me from atomysolutions.com. Problem is only a couple links show up to them in OSE so can't learn much there. I try to access their site but every page I do I get a 403 forbidden error. All I can gather is they are some kind of health and beauty thing. I did a site search in Google and looked at the cached result of the first page but it took me to sexyshoes.co.uk or something. I honestly cannot figure out. OSE shows them as one of my linking domains, but I can't see any of the pages linking to me. I need to know if this is a spammy site that I need to disavow. I have no idea how or why they link to me. Any insight from any Mozzers is GREATLY appreciated! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Microdata / Schema.org and HTTPS
I have a quick question regarding Microdata / Schema.org files that are not hosted on secure connections. I receive a receive a security error from my e-commerce site because the code references the schema over HTTP instead of HTTPS.<div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"></div<>This is not the first time I have run into this issue. We also use MRSS schema for an RSS feed from yahoo and the same thing happens.<div< span="">xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss"></div<>The problem mainly lies in the fact that these schemas are not hosted over HTTPS. If you add HTTPS to the beginning of both you will get a security error.Just wondering if anyone else has dealt with this or similar issue and what the "best practices" are around this?Is it ok to obtain the schema directly and then host it on our server, over our secure connection?Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyMangia0 -
Does Schema.org markup require a HTML 5 doctype?
I would like to implement Schema/microdata on a clients website, but the site is currently XHTML. Is html5 required for the micro data tags to be recognised? Will it work if I implement micro data on my XHTML site? Thanks for any advice you can offer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cmaddison1