SEO Implications of Domain name change and 301 redirects

[seangorman]

My employer has a site with a domain name that implies that the business is more restricted than it actually is.

As a marketing exercise, the business has decided that it would be better if we were to change the domain name. This means the creation of a new site with our current content and a 301 redirect to the new domain name from the old one.

Is there anything that I should be worrying about? If we set up an .htaccess file pointing to the new domain, this should allow all current links to work while we get them changed - right?
What might be the SEO implications of this change? What can I do to best ensure that the site doesn't lose too many places in the SERPs?
How long can I expect before the SEs identify and catalog this change?
How long might it be before I should take down the redirects, assuming the links are all changed before the SEs can catalog a change?

(We are being crawled daily by the top 3, and Ask comes by a coupla times a week.)

And many other question.
All help gratefully received.

[Robert_Charlton]

Originally Posted by seangorman

As a marketing exercise, the business has decided that it would be better if we were to change the domain name....

I caution you to be aware of the consequences. You're likely to disappear from Google for most searches for at least nine months.

Eventually, assuming you get some of your old inbound links to update and that you also get some new ones, you may miraculously pop back one day, as if nothing had happened. Or, you may not.

I feel that there's a series of age-related factors at play which, when multiplied, produce an almost exponential ranking decline. These affect new domains, which is what yours would be. Links also have an age component to them. Not all new domains are affected, but most are.

I'd never again change domains unless I absolutely had to. If you do have to make the change and your business is seasonal, try to time the change just after your busy season so that you might be ranking again by the next year.

Search for various threads on the "sandbox" effect here and on other forums to get the full picture. It's been a lively and contentious topic of discussion.

[seangorman]

Cheers for the Reply.

Yeah - I have read about the Sandbox, and have suffered in it with my own site, but I was hoping that the site, which has been around since 21-Nov-1999, might not suffer The Sandbox Effect if I arranged the 301s correctly.

It seems strange that the SEs might not take into account that existing firms may need to rebrand and not lose their position in the market.

[egain]

"I caution you to be aware of the consequences. You're likely to disappear from Google for most searches for at least nine months."

I think that is slightly over the top IMO. 301 redirects are the recommended by Google as the best way to perform a "transfer " from one domain to another as the original poster stated.

To tarnish this with the sandbox tag, seems slightly over the top, as there are a number of things that the seangorman could do in order to reduce the effect of the transfer to the new website. For example

- Register a domain that has recently expired
- Buy a domain of someone
- Ensure all redirects go to the valid pages, not 404's
- Ensure the 301 is correctly implemented.

Whilst there is no doubt that Google places some form of "delay" on new sites, I doubt in this case that the lag would be nine months. There probably will be some short term effect in terms of its current performance, however I doubt this will be as long term as the nine months mentioned

[seangorman]

Cool, cheers. Both sides of the argument. Always a good thing.

Cheers for the advice, egain, but other than:
- Ensure all redirects go to the valid pages, not 404's
- Ensure the 301 is correctly implemented.
There isn't much I can do.

This site is based on an Unix/Apache server, so I am hoping that the .htaccess file will be a help with regard the 301s.
There maybe a thought to move it over to our home servers, which are all Windows/IIS. This poses a problem for us as we have about 1000 pages.

[egain]

You may find this UBER post useful then

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...showtopic=5644

[seangorman]

Originally Posted by egain

You may find this UBER post useful then

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...showtopic=5644

Blimey. Thats a big post. With some big names.
Thanks again, egain.

[egain]

Always happy to help

[Robert_Charlton]

Originally Posted by egain

....301 redirects are the recommended by Google as the best way to perform a "transfer " from one domain to another as the original poster stated.

I wasn't advising against using a 301. That is indeed the correct way to do it. I was simply pointing out what a lot of people, myself included, have experienced when they have redirected an established site to a new domain. This doesn't happen to all sites, but it happens to a great many of them.

Originally Posted by egain

- Register a domain that has recently expired
- Buy a domain of someone

Generally, businessness that are changing domain names are doing so for branding purposes, so they're not likely to find a recently expired domain lying around that fits the bill. They usually have very specific ideas of what new name they want.

There should be no problem incidentally, using 301s in mod_rewrite to merge the www and non-www versions of a domain, which is what the HighRankings thread is talking about. The HighRankings thread, incidentally, dates from the early days of sandbox awareness, and isn't basically discussing changing domain names, albeit some of what's mentioned might apply.

[Marcia]

I think that is slightly over the top IMO. 301 redirects are the recommended by Google as the best way to perform a "transfer " from one domain to another as the original poster stated.

301 is definitely the way to do redirects to a new domain, but the sound advice given is NOT over the top, a lack of rankings for the new domain is EXACTLY what happens, as has been experienced by an innumerable number of people.

You may find this UBER post useful then

That UBER thread is from over two years ago and while it is excellent iinformation on how to do 301 redirects it has NOTHING at all to do with the loss of rankings that happens when moving a site over to a new domain.The technical aspects have nothing whatsoever to do with the consequences as far as rankings are concerned.

Whilst there is no doubt that Google places some form of "delay" on new sites, I doubt in this case that the lag would be nine months. There probably will be some short term effect in terms of its current performance, however I doubt this will be as long term as the nine months mentioned

Sorry, but "probably" and "doubt" don't always necessarily reflect reality.Two questions:

1. Have you moved any sites to new domains since the "delay" has been happening?
2. And if so, how long has it taken for the sites you have moved to new domains to be restored to their former rankings?

[egain]

Whilst you two have focussed long and hard on the thread on high rankings, it was there merely as a "how to " for the 301's on Apache - nothing else!!!!

In answer to the second point. I have performed a number of redirects over the last couple of months, with a "delay" ranging from a month or so, to three or four. This includes redirects to both new sites, and between existing sites

As you will appreciate, we as SEO's do not have control over the resultset of the various search engines thus I did not use the words WILL and "definitely wont" were not used.

[outofbounds]

I dont know how this particular issue was resolved for this thread but i have a similar challenge for which i would appreciate your help.

company has a domain name: www.domainname.com that was created in 2001. domainname.com has been used as their primary domain for ecommerce since that time.

recently they purchased another existing domain name - www.newdomain.com (actually the domain name appears to be owned by someone else - the registrant is someone in england... however it appears the owner has allowed us to switch the domain name servers to ours) That particular domain name was created in 2003.

Both domain names resolve to the same IP address and use the same name server.

the company wants to only use the new domain name now. and basically "switch" to the new domain name.

domainname.com:
*Inlinks (except from this domain): 532
*1,010 pages in google index
newdomain.com:
*Inlinks (except from this domain): none
*17 pages in index

my question is this:

What do we need to do to make this switch?
What are the risks?
How can we mitigate this risk?
Do we do a 301 redirect to the newdomain or is the issue taken care of by the name server configuration the way it is now?
Should we wait till the indices pick up the new site?

Thanks!

jay