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How bad is a domain name change for SEO and branding?
June 9th, 2009
Like some of you might know, I’ve changed my domain name quite a few times and I’d like to talk about the impacts of theses changes from a SEO/traffic and branding point of view. Changing a domain name can be quite bad, but honestly it depends on a lot of things like the size of your website, if you already have a very well established brand, if you’re targeting local traffic, etc. For me, it has proven to be quite a smooth process, but here are my experiences and recommendations.
SEO
SEO is usually the biggest concern when changing a domain name because most people think this will lead to losing all their backlinks. While it is not the best decision ever SEOwise, there is some techniques you can use to make sure you don’t lose your existing PR and backlinks. Fortunately for us, Google published some guidelines for moving a website:
- Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.
- Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.
- If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.
- Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).
- To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.
- Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.
- Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.
From my personal experience, within a month or two, you should recover your PR and the Google Index should be updated. So yes, expect some bad days especially within the first 2 weeks. Redirecting all your content to your new website using a 301 redirect is really the key, as it will tell Google the page has permanently moved and the new page should be considered as the original source from now on.
A nice side effect of using anchor text in the ranking algorithm Google uses is that you will continue to rank for your old name on Google. Even if the name is completely different, the links with your old website name now points to your new website because of the 301 redirect which mean you will most likely rank for that your old keywords.
A negative side effect that I can see from a SEO point of view is if you were targeting a specific geographic location with a particular TLD (.co.uk for example) and switched to a .com. If you don’t have enough backlinks from the country you are targetting and now don’t have a proper TLD for that country, you might disappear from the results for this country. So, be careful if you target a specific market or region.
Another negative impact that can happen is if you redirect your old domain to a subfolder of the new domain. Let’s say you are redirecting your established pizza.com domain to xyz.com/services/pizza. This might not help your rankings but honestly, it has nothing with moving the website, it’s a pure SEO issue: root domains tend to rank better than subfolders.
Backlinks
This is related to SEO, but backlinks are probably the biggest SEO concern for most people, so let’s make a new section for that. It is important to note that when using a permanent 301 redirect, all backlinks will now link to your new domain. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer and don’t see your old backlinks, it is absolutely normal, they will never appear for your new domain. They still exist, but Yahoo Site explorer doesn’t update with 301 redirects: it’s a bit dumb and only look for backlinks linking directly to your domain name. So, don’t panic, they’re still there and still giving you PageRank juice. Maybe not for the right keywords anymore though…
Branding and RSS Subscribers
To me, the biggest issue has always been branding and RSS Subscribers. I feel I’ve always made the right decision, but changing a brand’s name is never a good idea. People know you under a certain name and all of a sudden you’re someone else. Imagine if Wal-Mart decided to change their name, this would certainly impact their brand. Well, this is no different for a website, even if it’s on a much smaller scale. But you know, as long as changing your name is a long term decision, it’s a good decision.
Another important aspect to consider is if the site you are moving is a blog and you have to change the RSS Feed address. If you can keep the same address do it as it will avoid you a lot of pain. Services like FeedBurner usually offer a 30 days redirect to the new feed address, but you will lose some subscribers in the process as not all of them will take the time to update their feed reader. You can also see it as a way to keep only your interested readers.
Conclusion
As you see, moving a site to another domain isn’t as bad as it seems from a SEO point of view, but could hurt your brand. I’m sure you can find quite a lot of horror stories out there and I can imagine it can be quite a nightmare when moving a website with a million of pages indexed (delicious for example), but for most people I feel it’s not that bad.
26 Responses to “How bad is a domain name change for SEO and branding?”
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This is something I've been working on, too. I seem to spend a lot of time on brand development then I find an established brand that is too similar then its back to the drawing board. Lucky for you that you have a TLD of your name. My name is too common.
I just happened to check in frogstr and stumbled on to the change. The site is looking pretty good. Hope things work out.
Hey, happy to see you here!
Yep, well my full name wasn't available (benoittremblay.com), but I much prefer bentremblay.com as it's shorter and I feel it's more brandable and easier to type in as there is no two "t"s in a row. Anyway, hehe.
Good luck with your projects mate!
Hey Ben. Good tips about changing domain names. Many people do a 301 direct and expect their new rankings to show up right away. Even if you do everything right there is often a temporary drop in rankings. Doing everything you have suggested will minimize that drop though. After the move I would still do some extra link building consistently until things are back to normal.
-Jeremy
Thank you Jeremy.
Yep, the 301 redirect is good, but a slight drop in rankings is inevitable. Long term though, no difference. Link building is extremely important you are right because it's important to prove that this new domain is just as interesting and still attracts backlinks.
Thanks for your comment.
Excellent tips. I was kinda stupid about backlinks. Helpful stuff.
Thanks for the tips on SEO.
This is very good post for SEO. I also know that every domain name depend on it work and product.
I think every SEO is very thankful for this post. Its really very informative.
Thank you for this information. Thankfully, I haven't felt the need to change any of my domain names, but I will keep this saved just in case I have to!
Well that's a good thing and it's better that way. Avoiding a domain name change is always the best option!
Thanks for dropping a comment Carla!
Hey nice tips man. I was really concern about my new domains which i have changed and its effects on SEO. These SEO tips for new domains really useful and informative. Thanks
Great and useful article that was well thought and written. You even cover something about Yahoo siteexplorer that I was not aware of. So that's way cool by me… Thanks, you put a lot of effort into this post!
Hi Ben,
Great article on domains. I have do a fair amount of domain name changes and found the 301's worked very well with out much of any drop off at least with Google. I think that they have gotten much better at this over the years.
Changing the domain name is a standard operating procedure for us as all of our client have used their business names rather than keywords.
I was really concern about new domain changing. But after read your post i think i should try it. Thanks for this SEO Tips. It really great. Thanks
Top tips!.. thanks. keep up the good work
Really excellent tips. Could you please advice us about "indian TLD?", just like *.in, *.org.in, *.co.in etc?
Thanks for this Blog post about the affects of domain changing and seo. Some highly useful information here as I plan to move my worpress blog to a domain soon. Was torn b/t using the projectmadness.org site that I have hosted or using my name as my domain, moriyabeck.com. I may be asking more questions as I move forward with this process. Glad to know this blog post is available.
This is true, changing names will waste the built links so we would stick on domain names we already establised.
Get a list of what you do, words you like. Maybe even your name. Start putting some together. Lots of time you can find a good name that way!
hi
this is a good and amazing post.it is relay nice.
thanks..
Great post. If you have time could you respond to a question I have. I have been Google slapped and while I was on first page for my selected keyword I have now been moved to third page over a very short amount of time. I believe I was posting to many back links in a short period of time and google didn't like that. Is this recoverable or should I get a new domain with a new IP address and start over? Not sure how to move forward. Thanks!
Plenty of Loss changing established domain, 'PR' Lose and as you mentioned other factors back link, branding image in local area and totally new work from the scratch for new domain so it would more batter to have old domain and work on it or otherwise stay with old domain than go for new domain.
Another great and informative post — thanks Ben. I've been looking for a link checker and I bet Xenu will do the trick nicely. I love the Google Slap image as well
Ben,
what happened to you? Haven't heard any feedback from you for over 5 weeks. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I wish I would have found this like 3 months ago when I switched domain names. I guess I started out correctly, but when it came time to do the 301 redirect I ended up messing that part up and now have no pages showing up in any index. So if your planning on making the move don't be like me, make sure your 301s are working correctly and if they aren't contact your hosting company for help.
Thanks for the post. These are useful tips for us.