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What Is A Domain?

What are SEO best practices for moving to a new domain?

  • Over the last 2.5 years we have built up an ecommerce site that is ranking on no 1 positions in Google for approx. 25 high value keywords. Around 45% of sales are generated through organic traffic, 20% direct traffic, 15% PPC, etc. The business is a franchise, we own all revenues and just need to source a certain % from the franchise giver. The franchise giver however owns our country domain. Recently the franchise giver was bought by a large PE firm  with all previous management staff leaving and we see a risk of the new owners canceling our franchise contract and moving into our country directly. The only way to protect ourselves it seems is to move the shop to a new domain and thus over time built up similar traffic there. For the moment the current domain can still be used. The old domain has 2.5 years of backlink history with a healthy mix of quality & quantity (manually built do follow links, social bookmarks, seo press releases, article links, external blogs that we manage, natural social media links to the attached blog from users & media, many high quality backlinks to the front page or individual products from online blogs & magazines, directory links (e.g. dmoz), etc. pp.). What would be the best strategy to build up a second domain parallel to the old one in order to be able to switch to the new domain should it become necessary? E.g. Many of the manually built links could be changed to the new domain, however most of the high PR ranks from blogs, online magazines, review sites, etc. could probably not be changed.

  • Answer:

    Go to http://SEOMoz.org and search for "how to properly move domains", as duplicate content sucks you should just move if you're going that way - SEOMoz has the best guide to moving domains and it's in a check list style so you can follow through and ensure you've done the correct steps. I've used it before on clients sites that have decided to change domains and referred to that list time and time again but don't change domains if you don't have to, it's not worth it.

Jess Joyce at Quora Visit the source

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Hi! My team wrote a post about this question. Please enjoy, really hope it will be helpful. http://www.link-assistant.com/blog/how-to-move-a-domain/

Dan Richmond

Building up a second domain that mimics the first and moving the links over while the first one is still on is not really going to work how you want it to. Two sites with the same content is bad. What you can do is create a second site and transfer the old site to the new one. You will need to redirect traffic to the new site using a 301 redirect. This will tell search engines that this new domain will be the new permanent domain of choice and the old one will be obsolete. By using the 301 redirect, it will also allow any of the power generated by old in-bound links transfer to the new domain. Ideally you will want to keep a similar url-structure on the new site to make the redirect easier. Keep in mind this process does not work overnight and could take some time to work so I would suggest doing this at least 6 months before you are forced to give up the name. Furthermore if in the end this other company will be using the old site again with the exact same content it will not be good so you will need to figure out how to adjust your content to be more unique.

Jesse Friedman

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