To Redirect or Not
-
I have a strange situation and looking for advice on how well a permanent redirect of url will work.
I have an eCommerce site called twpstain.com. This site sells TWP Deck stain and the URL/Content is fully owned by me. We do not however own the TWP brand and have always operated with permission from the manufacturer as an Authorized dealer. Circumstance have come up where they now want to be in control of all URLS that have the name "TWP" in them. Not sure if they legally can do this but they can cut me off with product if I do not comply. My options are:
1. A permanent redirect of entire site to new URL that does not have the word "TWP" in the url.
2. Give them the URL but they are willing to have me use the URL as I have in the past. A contract for this would be drawn up to cover me for years to come and possibly offer compensation if they decide not to renew.
My concerns are numerous but the question for the Moz community is to how well the 301 redirect will work and will I lose my rankings? I currently dominate the rankings for my site and I very concerned that there will be major loss of sales and traffic.
Any help or opinions on this would be much appreciated.
-
That would be my concern, if they control the DNS, that would scare me as well.
I still think your best bet would be playing by their rules while spending your time building up a new website.
I would also recommend getting legal advice. I remember long ago I came across Nissan's website which now is functional, but for a while it was just a landing page that stated neither Nissan Computers nor Nissan Motors was allowed to use the website.
If you did a 301 redirect, and this company went hard enough and ended up demanding you to pull the domain, I would hate to see you loose all the 301 potential anyway, simply because they pulled the rug out from under you.
Good luck!!! If I were them I would try and just buy you out!
-
Several years ago when I first started in SEO, I bought domains that were relatively close to my competition's domains, it was a competitive tactic that is quite out dated. However, I never suffered any legal ramifications. My sites were not always live, they were just bought to prevent my competition from buying them.
That being said, I do not believe that they are trying to take the domain away from you for any other reason than it is their brand name and they want control of it, or they want it to disappear. You do not have to give them control of the site, I wouldn't personally. I would hate to have someone running my site, no thank you.
Having a brand is becoming extremely important for SEO. You are probably ranking so well because your domain includes an established brand. I would buy a domain that reflects the name of your business, your brand, and redirect the twpstains.com to that domain. You will see the most benefit from this approach. You will be able to maintain most of your SEO juice and be able to recover faster than if they take control of the domain and decide to do something else with it, like redirect it to their site, or redirect their site to twpstains.com. It wouldn't be in their best interest to have both sites running at the same time.
-
1. Redirect and content would be the exact same as I own the content and data.2. They want the URL but they want to make a contract with me and have the DNS point back to my site. Issue is they can play hardball and switch the DNS if they want or void the contract on conclusion.
Thanks for help!
-
I already do but this one ranks the best. Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks. They do not sell direct.
-
Wow,
Now this is quite a quagmire. TWP owns TWP-Stain.com and obviously is upset that you rank higher than they do for their own product, even though you sell their product. I probably would have thought you were the company if I didn't snoop around and hadn't met you on Moz.
Unfortunately because your domain name does include their brand, and is an identifying factor of the company to the public I believe they could technically take legal action. If the domain was "woodstains.com" it would be different because that's a generic term. (I AM NOT A LAWYER I JUST HAVE GONE THROUGH SOMETHING SIMILAR).
Regardless, in my opinion you are in a situation where they could potentially take over if they wanted to regardless of your wants and needs.
My Thoughts:
- 301 redirects do work, they will cause a drop in ranking, the more similar the content the better, but they will hurt.
- Another option would be to start a new website selling your goods and just negotiate a price to let them use that domain? That's what I do currently. I was in a situation where I ended up stepping out of a company, but I owned the domain. I still own it, but the DNS records point to their server, that way they are still in control of everything.
- Create another website, give them control of them domain, play by their rules, and link this current website to your new website. Take the stipend from them, let them worry about this website and profit. (Ryan typed it faster than me)
Hope this helps a little!
-
The contractual option sounds like it would be the best in this situation, especially since the site is solely dedicated to one brand.
Even with the contract in place you could still develop a separate site that carries multiple brands and begins to rank in other areas. That way you'd have some insurance if the contractual route eventually ends and not have to redirect form scratch.
-
If you have to change your domain name then you will most likely suffer rankings loss. You will redirect the old domain to the new domain, which will temporarily help, but you will basically have to work on the new URLs to get them to rank.
What they are asking for seems strange. Do they sell direct as well?
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
-
URL change - Sitemap update / redirect
Hi everyone Recently we performed a massive, hybrid site migration (CMS, URL, site structure change) without losing any traffic (yay!). Today I am finding out that our developers+copy writers decided to change Some URLs (pages are the same) without notifying anyone (I'm not going into details why). Anyhow, some URLs in site map changed, so old URLs don't exist anymore. Here is the example: OLD (in sitemap, indexed): https://www.domain.com/destinations/massachusetts/dennis-port NEW: https://www.domain.com/destinations/massachusetts/cape-cod Also, you should know that there is a number of redirects that happened in the past (whole site) Example : Last couple years redirections: HTTP to HTTPS non-www to www trailing slash to no trailing slash Most recent (a month ago ) Site Migration Redirects (URLs / site structure change) So I could add new URLs to the sitemap and resubmit in GSC. My dilemma is what to do with old URL? So we already have a ton of redirects and adding another one is not something I'm in favor of because of redirect loops and issues that can affect our SEO efforts. I would suggest to change the original, most recent 301 redirects and point to the new URL ( pre-migration 301 redirect to newly created URL). The goal is not to send mixed signals to SEs and not to lose visibility. Any advice? Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin0 -
Deep linking with redirects & building SEO
Hi there. I'm using deep linking with unique URL's that redirect to our website homepage or app (depending on whether the user accesses the link from an iphone or computer) as a way to track attribution and purchases. I'm wondering whether using links that redirect negatively affects our SEO? Is the homepage still building SEO rank despite the redirects? I appreciate your time & thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | L_M_SEO0 -
Any SEO value in gTLD redirect?
So, my client is thinking of purchasing several gTLDs with second level keywords important to us. Stuff like this...we don't want .popsicles, just the domain with the second level keyword. Those cost anywhere from $20-30 right now: grape.popsicles cherry.popsicles rocket.popsicles companyname.popsicles The thinking is that it's best to be defensive, not let a competitor get the gTLD with our name in it (agreed) and not let them capitalize on a keyword-rich gTLD (hmm). The theory was that we or a competitor could buy this gTLD and redirect it to our relevant page for, say, cherry popsicles. They wonder if that would help that gTLD page rank well - and sort of work in lieu of AdWords for pages that are not ranking well. I don't think this will work. A redirected page shouldn't rank better that the page it links to...unless Google gave it points for Exact Match in the URL. Do you think they will -- does Google grade any part of a URL that redirects? Viewing this video from Matt Cutts, I surmise that a gTLD would be ranked like any other page -- if its content, inbound links, etc. support a high DA, well, ok then, you get graded like every domain. In the case of a redirect, the page would not be indexed as a standalone so that is a moot point, right? So, any competitor buying a gTLD with the hopes of ranking well against us would have to build up pagerank in that new domain...and for our purposes I see that being hugely difficult for anyone - even us. Still, a defensive purchase of some of these might not be a bad idea since it's a fairly low cost investment. Other thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Blocking some countries and redirecting that traffic
Hi there, I have a video site, which is on CDN and is really expensive to run. So I want to block most of the countries and only keep HQ ones. I wonder if there's a difference if I just block them and show blank page, or if I show them a page with text and let's say a link to a different site or if I just simply redirect to some other site. Do you think I can still get good ranking on google on countries that I don't block?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
301 redirects within same domain
If I 301 redirects all urls from http://domain.com/folder/keyword to http://domain.com/folder/keyword.htm Are new urls likely to keep most of link juicy from source url and maintain the rankings in SERP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
Redirect one store to another...
Here's the situation: 2 online stores. Store A is doing really well, traffic, sales, and keyword ranking wise. Store B, not so much. Owner wants to redirect all links from store B to store A and then possibly re-brand store A and give it a different URL. This is a slow time, sales pick up in spring. I would like opinions on this from anyone who has done this or knows about it. Risks, benefits, best practices on going about it, etc... Thank you, Lisa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Freelancer130 -
301 redirects and Blogger - moving blog
Is there any way to add 301 redirects to individual posts on a blogger-hosted blog? We're getting ready to finally move our blog off of Blogger and onto our own webserver. We're probably going to use BlogEngine.net to run it. right now the blog is located at blog.MySite.com. We're probably going to move it to MySite.com/Blog. We don't have any really popular posts and we only really get ~10 visits a day on about 70 posts. Just trying to figure out the best way to handle this without inadvertently shooting myself in the foot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _JP_0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0