Patrick Altoft is the Director of Search at Branded3 and he wrote an article today about Google making it harder to migrate to a new domain. From the article:
Changing domains has never been something to be taken lightly but in the past year, Google appears to have made it tougher for brands to carry out a legitimate re-brand, or domain change for other reasons, without suffering catastrophic SEO losses. We’ve been talking to a number of businesses that have changed domains and lost huge amounts of SEO visibility, even after doing some of the things that are usually recommended during a migration. It seems that Google has got a lot stricter recently when it comes to deciding whether to transfer trust and authority to a new domain. Unless you execute the migration perfectly (which big brands dealing with lots of issues and constraints often fail to do) you run the risk of having a disaster. Any issues that can affect trust and authority such as lingering unnatural link messages or duplicate content/page bloat all come into play during the migration and it seems that if you combine one or two of these issues with not redirecting every single page to the relevant new page, Google will not pass full authority through to the new site.
Make sure to the read the whole article as Patrick has used some charts to illustrate how some sites have been affected.
This is something that Elliot Silver could probably comment on as he has done what is probably the biggest rebrand in the domain content space. Moving from Elliotsblog.com to DomainInvesting.com is something he has written about and hopefully he can also comment here on the article from Branded3. Matt Cutts has done a few videos on the topic but not recently, so maybe things have changed.
Here is one Matt did a few years back.
Just Stick with a nice generic / intuitive .com and everything will be fine and the engines will eventually find that a lot faster
Thanx – enjoyed the video! It featured suggestions I didn’t know about, like keep the old site live for 90-120 days.
Good news on a couple generic dot coms popular in domain industry news:
http://www.google.com/search?q=nuts
Nuts.com ranks high for search on, “nuts.”
Candy.com is out of the sandbox, at #162, page 17 of my search. Besides the url, the original blog writings must be propelling it back up!
it could be interesting to hear Elliot’s actual experience…
I Like the www domains.
a way to pay the Google SEO two times …
Although I saw a dip in traffic for the first week to ten days after the site migrated to DomainInvesting.com, I haven’t noticed any traffic issues since then. When I was in the planning stages, I put together a comprehensive checklist of items I needed to address before and after the migration, and I made sure all of those items were accomplished. I was fairly meticulous in addressing any issues, and I hired a company (Everspark Interactive) to help identify on-site issues that pre-dated the migration. One area where my website probably differs from many e-commerce sites is that 99.9% of the 4,000+ articles have been written by me and are unique to my website, and I’ve never done any off-site link building.
I checked the year over year numbers, and the # of visits from November of 2013 is 35.59% higher than November of 2012 and the # of unique visitors is 42.23% higher than the same month last year. As a comparison, the # of visits in October of 2013 was down -5.65% from October of 2012.
Elliot,
I guess if everything looks good …your old articles’ rankings/position haven’t been affected?
I am referring to the ones that show your old url…
http://elliotssblog.com/newgtld/wahteverwhatever…
I am asking becuase I read somewhere that the majority of the USAToday.com traffic comes from the”side doors” news found in the SE’s and each are a unique url….
@ Domo
As of right now, Google only has 4 ElliotsBlog.com articles in its index, and the rest have been re-indexed under the new url. The 301 redirects were key.
Thanks for the explanation, didn’t know they could be re-indexed and taking notes on the ‘301 redirects’.
That was interesting – thanx, @ Elliot! You make it sound like it’s easier than ever, instead of more complicated, so I don’t know what gives . . . 🙁
Hello MHB,
This article is yet another example of passive aggressive or veiled smoke screen influence. Bottom line its trying to discourage rebranding. There are many players with alterior motives jockying their influence propoganda. This article registers a solid FALSE.
Gratefully, Jeff schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
This article provides prima facie evidence / support for Domainers argument, recognized by VC Fred Wilson in 2011 (avc.com) — which other startup funders dont seem to understand:
“DONT BE A PENNY WISE, POUND FOOLISH”. ITS WORTH SPENDING SIGNIFICANT SUMS INITIALLY ON A GOOD DOMAIN NAME, AS CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING TO REBRAND LATER TO A GOOD DOMAIN NAME WILL BE COSTLY; NOT ONLY IN $$ BUT ALSO IN GOOGLE RANKINGS.
Surprised no one has commented on this so far.