Old Domain - What to do?
-
A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements.
Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website.
I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages).
If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.
-
There are a lot of factors to consider what you want to do with it. Personally, I tend to stray away from microsites due to 1) it's a lot of work for a team to build out more than one site & keep it maintained and 2) as far as the linking aspect, Google is getting smarter to tell who owns what domains, who owns the same domains, and how they're linked.
-
I'd almost certainly first try to use it as a micro-site. Would it be big deal to do a quick overhaul (not sure what your business is)? If you can generate leads from it, why risk a fishy redirect? Either way, could always link from the new domain to your existing and pass some of that link love.
Agree with Brandon too that more info is needed but I can't think of much that would convince me to do otherwise without trying this first.
Good luck
-
Brandon -
Thank you. I'll take a look at the question that was asked previously. I guess I missed it in my search before I asked this one. Much appreciated.
-
There was a similar question asked a few days ago. Not sure it directly corresponds to your situation but it is worth a read: http://www.seomoz.org/q/purchased-new-site-with-good-serp-ranks-do-i-operate-and-build-links-or-redirect-the-tld
To summarize: there is no easy answer and it requires careful analysis of both websites.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Same URL names in one domain
Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages. I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters. But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Blog.domain.co.uk or domain.co.uk/blog
Hi Guys, I'm just wondering which offers more SEO value and which is easier to set up out of: blog.domain.co.uk domain.co.uk/blog Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
Domain redirect
Recently we launched a site under a new domain, the site is doing well under the URL. Client calls me today and would like to have another domain he owns point to the new site. The domain he has has no history and no content. He is under the impression that people are looking for him by typing in www.domainxyz.com. I attempted to explain otherwise to him, but I lost. Question, what are the drawbacks of taking this domin and doing a perm redirect via . Httpaccess file?
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Sub Domains
Hi,,, Okay we have 1 main site , a few years back we went down the road of sub domains and generated about 10. They have page rank and age but we wish to move them back to the main web site. What is the correct or best way to achieve this. 1 copy all content to the main web site creating dup pages and then use a redirects from the sub pages to the new dup pages on the main domain... or 2 write new content on the main domain for the subdomain pages and redirect to the new content. Problem with 2 is the amount of work involved...
Technical SEO | | NotThatFast0 -
Why the rapid drop in Domain Authority?
I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin My rankings have remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking. The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions. Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern? Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve1 -
301 an old URL with a ? in the URL?
I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.
Technical SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Consolidating domains on root subject
I had several sites regarding a core subject. The main site was xyz.com and then I had multiple sites for the inner categories of xyz.com . I decided to consolidate everything to a single site and so did a change of address in webmaster tools and 301 redirected all niche sites to the appropriate page on the primary site of xyz.com. Shortly after we lost rankings for those niche pages. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0