Is a rebranding that calls for a domain change a good time to sneak in a change to HTTPS?
-
Assumed: The material around good migration/redesign practices recommend, logically enough, to change as few things as possible in any given step, thus giving search engines as little trouble as possible identifying and reindexing changes. So if someone is doing significant changes to content, including uri changes, and a rebranding that requires a domain migration, they are generally better off doing one, than the other.
1) Beyond immediate testing and checking for correct crawl health being reestablished after one change, any thoughts on rules of thumb for when to do the second change? Do you do it as soon as you see your rankings/traffic turn the corner and confirm an upward trend after the drop, or wait till you have it all back (or at least hit a plateau)? In the absence of data or best practice I'm thinking of just letting 1/3rd to 2/3rds come back.
- Is a change to HTTPS small enough/similar enough from the search engine's perspective that it makes more sense to do that at the same time as the rebrand driven domain change? Does this create any special risks or considerations beyond those that arise from the individual components of the change?
-
HTTPS is one of the ranking factors and is in testing phase. However, in the near future, it might become a vital factor. Since you are going for a re-branding, now is the time to take the decision.
Regards
-
I don't think that you should wait to change from HTTP to HTTPS. You are developing an entirely new website and domain name. To the engine this won't look like changes made on one site. They are going to see this as a brand new website. So basically, it isn't a matter of making changes too close together, it is creating the website you want, how you want it, right away.
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
-
FireCheckout any good?
Interested to know if anybody has any experience of FireCheckout Magento 1.9? The built-in Magento checkout doesn't seem to be mobile friendly and is a bit clunky, hoping to achieve a responsive checkout and a more user-friendly interface.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Website Not Performing after switch to HTTPS
We recently switched our client's website to HTTPS but after the move, we've experienced a huge decrease in rankings (off the map), and traffic. Our metas for the homepage are not being picked up by Google, although it was appearing correctly before the switch. We've implemented all redirects, resubmitted URL to Google, and updated GSC. GSC is also reporting errors in our XML stating there are no URLs to crawl. Has anyone had any issues similar? What do you all recommend? Help greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMRTCHInteractive0 -
Change of address webmaster tools
Hi dear experts; I trying to migration to https and follow the guide line that explain how to do it. After redirect 301, I created new property on WMT for ssl version and change the pre address to new one. but as you can see in the attach file, the new property does not appear in the list. the old version of domain is: sharifconsult.ir the new one is : https://sharifconsult.ir yd9fL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoiransite0 -
Redirecting to a new domain... a second time
Hi all, I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this: Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we... Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to... third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL. My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right? The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3) Thanks for any insights on this! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC1 -
Should I change my permalink structure?
Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice! What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall. Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Multiple domains expiring that have 301 redirects to my primary domain. Am I in trouble?
I recently took on the SEO of a large website with http://example.com. My predecessor bought 40 plus domains for specific cities like Jacksonvilleexample.com, Miamiexample.com, etc. ZERO of the additional domains linked to our main website. The domains that were bought basically had our exact same website in terms of content, links etc that mirrored our main http://example.com. I added 301 redirects to help problems that may be a result of this type of structure. Some of the additional domains were indexed and some were not but all have 301's and as far as traffic is concerned I'm not worried about loosing short term traffic. My question: All the domains are set to expire in June and I don't want to continue to have them 301 redirected to my main domain (example.com). I'm not trying to avoid the additional cost of all the domains but I don't see an advantage to having them so CAN letting all these domains expire hurt me from a long term SEO position if I don't renew them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ballanrk0 -
Changing URL Structure
We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure. My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones. How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0