Examples of Domain Change for Big Brands
-
Hi
I am trying to put together a case study with big brands that have changed their domain names over the last 2 years. So far I have:
guardian.co.uk -> theguardian.com
Are there any others you could think of? It'd be much appreciated!
Thanks,
C
-
One we were watching, the Official site for Jehovah's Witnesses went from watchtower.org to jw.org with a major site redesign. What makes it an interesting case study is that it was a multi language site as well.
-
here's the link to it --> http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
-
Hi Carlos,
SEOMoz.com to MOZ.com....fantastic step by step and case study also published in the blog area thanks to the wonderful Mozers
All really well documented and graphed so you can understand how you should go about such a drastic change with minimal impacts to your brand as well as your organic traffic.
Cheers,
K
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
-
What is the perfect strategy for a Brand that manufactures the product?
Hello Moz Community, I'm currently associated with one of the brands. It's a nutrition and supplement brand that manufacture supplements. Now, they are running an e-commerce website. Problem: It should be product based website, not an e-commerce website (Like Design, Look and Feel of it.) The problem with SEO: What do you thing like which will work better.
Branding | | Max_
1. Doing Perfect On-Page SEO? And building links for queries like: Best whey protein supplement in "Geo." Buy Protein Powder Online Buy Whey Online "Geo." Generic Terms Brand Name URL All the Remaining Keywords and Anchors OR 1. Doing a perfect On-Page SEO? and
2. Doing massive outreach like Inviting bloggers for guest post (Natural Anchor) Guest Posts (Natural Anchor) Mentions on social media Content Local Business about reciprocal promotions Email outreach Product Reviews Influencers content Link building as mentioned above Q. Tell me which will work the best?
Q. What I've to change in the strategy?
Q. Also tell me how to do a perfect keyword research for product pages? Thank you0 -
Wikipedia and Domain Authority?
Hi there, my company is an online publisher of Theater news and reviews. We also sell theater tickets. We presently don't have a Wikipedia page. Would creating one generally help our search rankings?
Branding | | TheaterMania0 -
Changing My Home Page Focus Keyword
Hello, We recently launched a new home page design on our company website, but we still have the same focus keyword in the title, H1, and in parts of the page copy. However, this focus keyword no longer represents our entire brand. We want to change the focus keyword and have done some research on the keyword difficulty and local searches in Google, but are still uncertain on the potential effects. Let me explain our situation more in depth. Instabill provides business owners with merchant accounts and other services. Our current focus keyword is offshore merchant accounts. However, over the past three months, we have been helping businesses establish US merchant accounts (retail, mobile, and online--but retail and mobile to US only while online to merchants everywhere) and intend to continue to increase our US merchant base. We are also still able to provide offshore merchant accounts. Our fear is that when a US merchant comes to our website (http://www.instabill.com), they will see Offshore Merchant Accounts in big H1 letters and leave our site since they want a local US merchant account. However, we still want to make sure our international merchants know we can still work with them. Thus said, we would like to change our focus keyword to something more broad, but still descriptive of our brand: merchant services. To elaborate, we want our H1 heading to read Merchant Services for Retail and Online Businesses. Merchant services is more descriptive since we provide more than just merchant accounts. We also provide the payment gateway, free shopping cart modules, help registering businesses, help obtaining an SSL certificate, and a discounted PCI Certification Service through McAfee. We have more than one page on our website that ranks for the term online merchant accounts, but none that rank for merchant services. However, we are willing to put in the work to ensure we optimize our website properly and put in the effort to make the change successful. Merchant services is also a keyword we would like to optimize on our website, so making the change on the home page will only help the steps in the process. Statistics:
Branding | | Instabill
Offshore Merchant Accounts has a 35% difficulty level and we consistently rank for SERPs #1 and #2. This term, according to the Google Keyword Tool, only receives 70 monthly searches in the US, 50 in the UK, 10 in Canada, and 10 in Australia. These are the four countries of most importance to our website. Merchant Services has a 57% difficulty level and we do not rank for it in Google at all since we have never tried to optimize for this term in the past. Also according to the Google Keyword Tool, this term receives 14,800 monthly searches in the US, 1,600 in the UK, 590 in Canada, and 260 in Australia. Clearly, merchant services could potentially get us much more traffic than offshore merchant accounts if transitioned correctly. I suppose my bottom line question is this: Would it be a bad idea to change my primary focus keyword on my home page? What type of results should I expect to see if searching Google for my company name? Thank you for all of your help. Meghan
Senior Copywriter of Instabill0 -
Trying to decide on best domain
I am trying to decide on a domain for a real estate site in Utah where the area code is 801. My choices are utahhomes801.com, the search term "utah homes" get 3600 exact matches, utahrealestate801.com with "utah real estate" getting 22,200 exact matches or forget the 801 and go for a shorter domain Utahnow.net or utahhomeboy.com. Is there any reason to stay away from 801 in the domain? Any thought or direction would be appreciated. Scott
Branding | | rozier0 -
301 or 302 for one of our domains
We have one of our sites that we got rid of and incorporated into our "main" site. We left a 302 redirect from the old sites URL to a landing page on the new site. It act as a branded stub page before registration. We are currently using a 302 to redirect from www.oldsite.com -> www.newbigsite.com/old-site Should I change this to a 301? I loose my google SERP ranking for www.oldsite.com if I do the 301 and it will be replaced by www.newbigsite.com/old-site correct? Thanks
Branding | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
List Quick and Dirty places to seo-tag images/content for new brands
I'm helping a new brand (service industry) to try to dominate the first page for their own name. They have a name that also exists in another state AND a negative Yelp review which (shows up #4, whilst they show up #1 on google unpersonalized search). Aside from Linkedin/Facebook/twitter, what are good places to Tag Images and have them show up under the search for this company's name. This is a picture/heavy industry (jewelry) and I'm looking to create profiles on several sites that would immediately show up if I tag the content properly. Are quora/pinterest good choices? I need to grab-bag as many properties as possible. Secondary question: would these properties on quora etc, respond well to exact-match anchor text links to shoot them past the negative yelp rating that is showing up #4 for their brand?
Branding | | ilyaelbert0 -
Use blog.domain.com or socialbrand.com?
I've got a little bit of a dilemma. A company I'm working for has an ecommerce site that is moving to Volusion. It is impossible to add "domain.com/blog" so I am forced to use a subdomain in order to keep consistency. We are starting a push in Social media and have secured shorter handles for the brand to use on the different networks. One of the main goals originally for developing a blog is to build trust but since the domain names are so big (26 characters) and the ecommerce sites already have a good amount of trust building factors in them I am beginning to question my original plan. My question is this: If I go with a shorter brand recognized domain name to develop the blog on which is different than the ecommerce domain (keyword matched) will I loose too much trust and ranking opportunity because of the difference in domains. I know there isn't a golden bullet for this question but i would love to get you your take on it.
Branding | | BenRWoodard0 -
Would a 301 redirect on a keyword based domain be a worth-while investment?
Similar questions have been asked - but I couldn't find a direct answer to my specific question here. I have the opportunity to purchase our exact keyword phrase domain name for fairly cheap (if I sold red balloons it would be redballoons.com). If I i set it up to 301 redirect to our main domain - would it provide any short-term or long-term SEO benifits? ADDITIONAL INFO: I sell a service to a niche market and in a relatively short amount of time have been able to rank #21 on our main keywords. Our domain is fairly young (about 1.5yrs), but we are WAY behind our main competition in the link building category (they have been at it for 10+ years). I'm looking for an interim solution to drive genuine SEO traffic while we work on our link building over time. Our main keywords only get about 15,000 global searches per month (google) and some of those are not our market (don't know how many exactly). The competition for our keyword is classified as "medium" in google adwords. It's really only worth it to me if I can begin getting page 1 results from this practice. Thanks in advance!!!
Branding | | aaronharlow0