Thoughts on my change of address delima?
-
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains.
- internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website)
- companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website)
We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that.
My main concerns...
- From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case?
- As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we?
- Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts?
This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
-
This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch. That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do:
- GWT change of address
- 301 Redirection
- New links at time of redirection pointing to new site.
All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.
-
Can we put a percentage on 301 link dilution? We can't stay on the current domain so the question becomes what is the recovery time of newdomain.com (with Webmaster Tool site transfer) vs us.internationalcompany.com?
P.S. Thank you both for the continued responses.
-
Hi Tyler. Here's another case study that might give you some ideas about what you decide: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. From that example, you can see all the factors they took into consideration before combining the two. If it's great enough, you might convince the Corporate Website that it could be worth it.
As for the DA of a subdomain, that's not quite right. While the DA of internationalcompany.com won't be affected by the creation of us.internationalcompany.com, us.internationalcompany.com will start out as a new site. With the 301 redirection from your old domain to the new, it should pick up strength quickly, but it won't mirror the DA of the parent company's root domain. You can check this with PA comparisons of many sites that are hosted on subdomains as companies like wordpress and tumblr offer. Whatever you decide it looks like you'll need solid by in from corporate if you're working off of their servers so that you can address things like the robots.txt file, adding GWT verification code, and so on.
As a technical note, you can point a subdomain at a unique IP address by using an A Name instead of a cname in DNS. This means that us.internationalcompany.com could point at your servers as long as they have a static IP. That would give you more flexibility in working with file transfers, code and the like.
-
- The company outsourced the website to a 3rd party development company. My team has been told by the corporate office that the dev company owns the code and servers that the website resides on and we're simply using what they were paid to develop for us. To get the access that we want we'd have to buy the code and from what I've gathered it won't come cheap.
- That sounds comforting. So in this scenario a strong emphasis on establishing proper 301's and maintaining page authority should leave us in a better position than when we started?
-
Re: 1- Tough call. Why can't someone have access to the main site?
Re: 2- Subdomains now have the same DA as the rest of the domain.
Re: 3- Great company to study,
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
-
Too many SEO changes needed on a page. Create a new page?
I've been doing some research on a keyword with Page Optimization. I'm finding there's a lot of changes suggested. I'm wondering that because of the amount of changes required is it better to create a new page entirely from scratch that has all the suggestions implemented OR change the current page? Thanks, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris29181 -
Recent changes to Google organic search?
We have a client's website that was on page 1 for 2 years, and then in September fell off while a new website with virtually no visitors and never showing in organic search before shot to #1. Never seen anything like it. Today, my client is back where they were two weeks ago and the #1 listing I mentioned is not even on page 1 at all. In fact it's at the bottom of page 2! It seems to us, having read about Google organic changes made around July 3rd, 2018, that even more emphasis is now on the domain name (all the results on page 1 have my client's keyword in their domain name) and the importance of H1 tags and Title tags has risen to trump many other factors. Can anyone shed some light on changes you may have seen in the past few months? Along with huge changes to Adwords and AdGrants, Google seems all over the place (at least to us) and it is more challenging then ever. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Teamzig0 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
How to switch brand domain and address previous use of domain
We recently acquired a new domain to replace existing as it better fits our brand. We have little/no organic value on existing domain so switching is not an issue. However the newly acquired domain was previously used in a different industry and has inbound links with significant spam scores. How can we let Google know that these links are not valid for our business and start rebuilding reputation of the domain? Disavow tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marlette0 -
Improve change my Meta Description shows in SERP
I feel my meta descriptions are descriptive and fairly represent the info on each page of my site. However, Google frequently includes this "20+ items" in front of the snippet. I run a job site and each page list 20 jobs. What if I include a bit of coding in the Meta Description to include "Latest Jobs Posted TODAY's DATE" - since the jobs listed on the page will include a date. On each page there is also option to "Create Email Alert" and "save Jobs" maybe I should include writing about that as well? I have read all Google's documents on the importance of making Meta Des relevant for the page etc, so any good insight how increase my chances of getting the meta des displayed in the SERP would be appreciated. thank you, Kristian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
301 vs Changing Link href
We have changed our company and want to 301 old domain from new domain in order to transfer the benefits of backlinks (DA: 50, 115 Linking Root Domains). I have the ability to modify around 50% of the backlinks. So my question is: Instead of redirecting all the links, should I update the 50% to link to the new domain instead of relying on redirects? Would this possibly trip an algorithmic filter and devalue these links? Or should I just do a 301 and not worry about modifying the links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
Changing URL Structure
We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure. My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones. How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0