Changing domain names: Need Help

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I'm thinking of changing the name of my company because our client base and products have changed since we first started the company. With a new name comes a new domain name. The site has been online for 7 years and I would love to keep the domain for SEO purposes, but from all of the research I've done it's an extremely bad SEO strategy to have two domains for the same site. What I'm thinking of doing is creating a new site with the same content, but making improvements to the new site such as seo friendly url's, fixing html errors, etc and doing a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one.

If you have done this before or know the best ways to do this, let me know. It kind of sucks to start with another domain, but in the long term it may be better. I just want to know the best way to do this without damaging all of the work we've put into the site for the past 7 yrs.
#website design #changing #domain #names
  • It's Certainly very bad SEO Technique to have two domains with the same content. But you are right on point that is to have a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. Additionally you can just forward the entire old domain to the new. I will certainly stick to the former.
    You should be fine with the SEO bit. The search engines will not penalise you for too much for this. After a while the new domain will gain ground and stand on it's own.

    I wish you luck with your business.

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  • Could you rewrite the content to make it more unique when you set the new site up? Forwarding the old site to the new should (in time) undo the old site in the search engines, helping the new site get up to speed quickly.


    Cindy
  • I have written a blog post about how to do this as i have done this myself on several of my blogs and also completed this for clients many times

    You need to notify Google of the change of address (using webmaster tools) so they will not penalise you for duplicate content.
    They will decide on which sites content is indexed in SERPS
    The new domain will not get PR immediately which shouldn't effect your SERPS
    The main concern you should have is the links, especially the internal links
    The incoming links can be redirected using 301 redirect in your hosts Cpanel
    However, the internal links may become broken depending on how you complete the backup, migration and restoration to your new domain
    There is a solution that makes this process fast and simple and its in my blog post on How to backup your site and move wordpress to a new host/domain
    I"m assuming your site is wordpress, if this is NOT the case then this transfer method is not applicable
  • Wow, more and more, Google is starting to sound like an arm of the government.
  • Why not rebrand - leave your old site in place and create a new brand targeted at your audience. Software publishers do this all the time.
  • As you said, the best option will be to create a new website. If you have any product page that's bringing traffic, forward the traffic to the relevant page on your new site. When you are doing a permanent redirection, it tells Google that the new site is a new version of the old one and helps transfer reputation and other ranking.
  • Thanks for the feedback.
    • [1] reply
    • When you do a 301 redirect, it redirects the main URL. I assume you have to have all the same internal page names on the new site? I have over 100 indexed pages but I was thinking about changing to WordPress and changing to a .com
  • OP - did you find a specific tutorial that worked out for you? I'm in the exact same boat now...
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    Changing domain names: Need Help

    I'm thinking of changing the name of my company because our client base and products have changed since we first started the company. With a new name comes a new domain name. The site has been online for 7 years and I would love to keep the domain for SEO purposes, but from all of the research I've done it's an extremely bad SEO strategy to have two domains for the same site. What I'm thinking of doing is creating a new site with the same content, but making improvements to the new site such as seo friendly url's, fixing html errors, etc and doing a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. If you have done this before or know the best ways to do this, let me know. It kind of sucks to start with another domain, but in the long term it may be better. I just want to know the best way to do this without damaging all of the work we've put into the site for the past 7 yrs.