Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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://outdoorsrank.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
http://outdoorsrank.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition
http://outdoorsrank.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/
Also, lots of Domain Name Transfer - Site Transfer Type Checklists
http://outdoorsrank.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
-
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
Best Practices for Moving a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder
One of my clients is moving their subdomain to a subfolder on their main domain. (ie. blog.example.com to example.com/blog) I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on some best practices for things we should be doing/looking for when making this move.? ie WMT, .htaccess, 301s etc? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault741 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Changing a url from .html to .com
Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Factors that affect Google.com vs .ca
Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"! 🙂 Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com. One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com. Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobM4161
