SEO for a redirected domain name
-
Our client is a law firm with a name that is challenging to spell. We have procured a domain name for them that is catchy, easy to spell, and plays well into their brand, or at least the current campaign. We're using the campaign domain to direct traffic to their website with a 301 redirect. We have placed the campaign domain in a variety of offline mediums including print and outdoor.
The client is currently in the number 1 spot for a good number of our highest priority keywords, so I do not want to do anything to jeopardize that. I'm also not sure this campaign will be their "brand" long-term so I don't want to risk making a switch and making it back. So for now, I'm most comfortable leaving the campaign domain as a redirect to their primary domain.
Recently, the client approached me complaining (legitimately) that when people google the campaign domain, they are brought to search results for an entirely different domain because Google "corrects" the domain name for them. This is obviously a bad thing, with many users defaulting to entering urls into Google instead of the address bar.
If you tell Google that it was wrong about the autocorrection, our site is in the number 1 position.
I liken the situation to Overstock.com using O.co as their offline domain, but overstock.com as their online domain. But imagine if you googled o.co and google brought you to a list of results for "on.co" because it assumed you fat-fingered it.
Is there anything I can do to prevent the domain name from getting corrected by Google?
-
Here's a middle ground.
Allow the homepage of the redirected domain to be indexed. Put something useful there.
Change the campaign URL to be a deep page such as SchwempleToSchpell.com/schpelling and redirect that.
John
-
Steve
Please read what EGOL wrote first. If you want to stop "auto-correction" (which is a user choice) you must allow the domain to appear in the SERPs. Otherwise, how does the user know that it should not be corrected. But, secondarily, I think you need to also tell your client to chill. (Yes, we have attorneys for clients and they are large clients with nationwide campaigns). Understand, attorneys know everything, ask them. They are assuming people are staying with the corrected version as opposed to overriding. Google does NOT take them to a different domain. Google gives them a choice (showing results for xyz.com - show results for yyz.com instead?).
There is no way to stop the auto correct; just as there is no way to stop an attorney from being totally brilliant, ask them.
Best
-
If you want the campaign domain to appear in the search results then you must remove the 301 redirect and allow it to appear in the SERPs.
Google really isn't "correcting" anything. This company has sacrificed the brand of their campaign by allowing that domain to be 301ed to their primary website. This happens on the server, not in Google. Google is obediently following instructions.
This law firm wants to be know as SimpleToSpell.com but they don't want to give up SchwempleToSchpell.com
Just a thought... it is very possible that their new domain will have a lot of competition in the SERPs. I bet it would be pretty hard to rank for something like "simple to spell".... and they will be pissed if they redirect to this new and simple domain and rank at #13 for their brand. So, if they have future plans of using this domain they better get a website on it and start putting some work into it. Get your feet onto the turf and see how it works.
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
-
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Redirect closed shop to main shop, or keep the domain and content alive and use it for link building?
Hello, We used to have two shops selling our products, a small shop with a small selection of only our best quality products (domain smallshop.com), and a big shop with everything (bigshop.com). It used to make sense (without going into full detail), but it's not relevant anymore, and so we decided to stop maintaining the small shop, because it was time consuming and not worth it. There is some really good links pointing to smallshop.com, and the content is original (the product descriptions are different between both shops). So far, we just switch the "add to cart" button on the small shop into a link to the same product on the big shop, and did links from the small shop to the big shop also on categories pages. So the question is: in your opinion, is it better to do that, keep the small shop and content alive and build links to our big shop, or do 301 redirections and shut down completely the small shop ? Thanks for your opinion!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
Sub-Domain or Folder. Which is better for SEO.?
Hey all. I just need clarification that which one is better to use for big property or travel portal. Check below example: I have a website which runs for multiple location like india, uk, canada, uae. For every location the content is different. So my question is that for better SEO results should i use india.xyz.com or **xyz.com/india/ **. One more example **canada.xyz.com **or xyz.com/canada/ Can anyone please suggest which one is better. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PFX1110 -
Is having a .uk.com domain a hindrance for long-term SEO?
I know there has been some mention on Moz Q&A for .uk.com, but not for at least 3 years. So I wanted to see if any Mozzers out there knew if having a .uk.com domain would hinder our SEO long-term? Our company is finally now taking SEO seriously and we're planning some great stuff for the year ahead, but I have a feeling that our .uk.com domain may prevent us from out-ranking some of the bigger companies out there. Does anyone have any thoughts about this out there? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Company name doesn't have keyword: use domains instead?
Good Morning! Now, I'll admit, I may be obsessing a little too much on this, and it may not make that big of an impact in the long run, but with Google being introduced to the world if I were to start a business today I would try and include my keyword into the title of my business. For example Dollar Shave Club, at least they got the word shave in there. My business doesn't have a keyword in our name, is it beneficial to structure our URLs to include a keyword so that all of our URLs include that word? So if I sell organic bananas, but my company is called Evananas, is it worth it to have all domains become a child of Evananas.com/organic_bananas? That way at least we have the keyword "Organic Bananas" in our title? So I could then have things like: evananas.com/organic_bananas/recipes evananas.com/organic_bananas/benefits evananas.com/organic_bananas/taste_really_freeking_good Vs. evananas.com/recipes evananas.com/benefits evananas.com/taste_really_freeking_good I'm not sure it makes a difference. The other problem is I want to keep our URL's as short as possible. I feel like less is always more, but I was always under the impression domain/URL based keywords were rather powerful. What is the best practice in this case? Thanks Guys! Evan(ana)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Domain Forwarding
I have a client who previously registered 20 unique domain names that tied to their company name and services. They use all of these domains to forward to their main website to try and capture additional traffic. Would you suggest that we remove all of the domains by 301 redirecting them all the the main website? I am trying to find a good article that shows the implications on SEO by using many domains that forward to a main website. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prager0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0