Temporary Domain Changes
-
Hi All,
Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward.
My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
-
Hi everyone
I'm in the same boat too. If either Tim or Dan (or anyone else) have any learnings besides the advice shared here please do.Thanks, Kayley
-
Hi Dan,
I was wondering how this all turned out for you? I'm in a similar boat right now. Any advice you can share?
Thanks,
Tim
-
Thanks Paul,
I'll try to make sure to keep an eye on this site move as it's much different than any other site moves i've implemented and it's incredibly tricky.
Dan
-
I suspect your idea for 302ing to the temp new URL is probably the best you can do given the circumstances, Jeff. The alternative would be to leave the domain the same and have all pages return a 503 header with a Retry After header indicating a time span after the return to the normal site. But this is more invasive and probably more prone to errors. If the 302 redirect stays in place for too long, search indexers may start to consider it permanent despite the 302 status, but keeping it to one week likely shouldn't cause this.
My suggestion from a marketing perspective - I would make the temp site be something like www2.sitename.com instead of "new". This way, most visitors are unlikely to even notice. If they see the "new.sitename.com" site for a week, then are put back on what they now consider the "old" site - they may think they're getting shortchanged or something is wrong that they're no longer getting the "right" version of the site.
The other thing to make sure you've checked on - what other 3rd-party integrations/tools/advertising networks/analytics etc will need to be addressed while the redirect is in place? (For example, Adwords and many ad platforms don't look kindly on ads that redirect from their display URL to a new URL.) So make sure you've checked out and adjusted for any of those. Your SSL certificate and SMTP/site notification email sending functionality are other examples.
And yea, communication and setting expectations will be key here. If the devs truly can't accomplish what they need to any other way than such a major upheaval, everyone needs to be clear that all steps will be taken, there is a plan for the move, for the return, and for monitoring and trying to compensate afterwards (like maybe some extra PPC ready to go if a significant traffic drop will require recovery time?). But there are significant unknowns and while every effort will be made to minimise impact, things beyond your control will have possible negative effects and it's impossible to know in advance how severe they might be. You'll want a clear communication plan for all stakeholders of each of these steps in advance. You don't want to be trying to come up with the communications while in the middle of the process.
Sounds like an opportunity for an interesting case study - be sure to let us know how it goes. Good luck!
Paul
[Edited to add - verifying a new GSC property for the new subdomain(but not submitting any sitemap or fetch) would be a good idea. That would let you monitor whether any of the site was getting indexed. Then as soon as the site goes back to normal and the temp site is 301-redirected back, you could use it to declare a change of address back to the main site to help get any of the temp URLs out of the index faster, (assuming any get indexed) ]
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
-
Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
Is it possible to migrate to a new domain name without negatively impacting SEO? Our existing domain name (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) is a bit spammy. It has been used for almost 10 years. We would like to migrate it to www.metro-manhattan.com. The metro-manhattan domain has been registered about 5 years and it redirects to the nyc-officespace-leader.com domain. The nyc-officespace-leader.com has a domain authority of 23 and a page authority of 32. The metro-manhattan domain has a domain authority of 7 and a page authority of 23. Is it possible to make this transition without losing domain authority and page rank? I would think that having two domains might loo spammy to Google and this change would be a positive in the long term. We do understand that the redirects for each page would need to be done carefully. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Is there a way to increase domain authority?
Dear all, when I see moz analytics for my blog irctcloginindia.co.in, it is legging behind only in terms of diomain authority when compared to my competitors. Because of which it is ranking low. Is there any short cut or fast method using which I can increase the authority for my domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irctclogin0 -
Thoughts on my change of address delima?
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains. internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website) companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website) We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that. My main concerns... From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case? As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we? Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts? This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Do links to a domain that re-directs to my domain pass link equity?
Hi guys. We've recently taken control of a third-party site and we're going to set up a domain re-direct so any traffic comes to our site. With any existing links that the third-party site has, will these pass link equity to our main site through the redirect? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Site Penalty After Changing Hosting Companies?
In one week's time, we've dropped from #3 on Page 1 of Google to Page 7 (similar on Bing). It looks like our traffic started to drop on 9/5 to 9/7 and has been a steady, rapid decline ever since. 1000s of pages are indexed, just suddenly ranking poorly -- even for branded terms. History:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddwilliamson
--In January, we switched to a web redesign & new domain
--In August, our hosting server was slow & kept crashing so we migrated our site to a new hosting company. We're not currently using the old hosting server. All domains, redirects, .htaccess files should now be correct and site speeds are improved.
--In early September, our NEW hosting company had a DNS issue causing more slow speeds and downtime for about 1 wk. Originally they thought it was htaccess so they changed our htaccess file - no luck - then discovered it was DNS. DNS issue was finally resolved on September 6th -- one day before the penalty/traffic issue seemed to begin.
-- According to GWMT, it looks like there were crawls completed around 9/4-9/5 What we've tried:
--Webmaster Tools - Googlebot dropoff since 9/5 (see attached screenshot). Nothing flagged. No site health alerts. Fetch as Google works. No manual webspam actions found.
-- W3C link checker, screamingfrog SEO spider, Xenu Link Sleuth, OSE (found some 4xx errors so we've updated those links)
-- Majestic SEO - backlinks reviewed 9/3 to 9/8
-- spoke to two different Adwords salespeople; unable to help
-- Bing Webmaster Tools
-- not showing organic search traffic since 9/6
-- 15% fewer pages crawled this month
-- top keywords are very odd -- stuff like "mt1 google apis" and "aaremel"
-- there are 4xx crawl errors under Crawl Information. We've fixed those URLs but they still appear in Webmaster Tools
-- some missing h1's and meta's, and dup titles, which we're working to fix
-- spike in crawl errors 9/11-9/12 and again on 9/14-9/15 It's been one thing after another this year, but all issues are now resolved with the exception of this newly-discovered penalty. We also have sites on a separate hosting server (with a different hosting company) that rank just fine. googlebot-crawls.jpg0 -
Should we move a strong category page, or the whole domain to new domain?
We are debating moving a strong category page (and subcategory, product pages) from our current older domain to a new domain vs just moving the whole domain. The older domain has DA 40+, and the category page has PA 40+. Anyone with experience on how much PR etc will get passed to a virgin domain if we just redirect olddomain/strongcategorypage/ to newdomain.com? If the answer is little to none, we might consider just moving the whole site since the other categories are not that strong anyway. We will use 301 approach either way. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Durand0 -
BIG CHANGE - 301 Main site to new domain
Hi Guys, Were wondering what to do about our main domain name, we were ranking quite high for our main keyword and before Christmas our site dropped to 10th and we have been there for a while - last week our site dropped again onto the second page. The worrying thing is now our main domain name is now ranking 1 place above another domain name that we don't really use but its an exact match domain name for our target keyword. This exact match domain has hardly any links pointing to it and it currently has a 22 domain authority. We are wondering if we 301 our main site to this exact match domain would it rank higher than the top of the 2nd page where we are now for our main domain. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW1 -
Should we move to a new domain??
Working with a company that is considering moving to a new domain and wanted some advice.They have 2 domains (they own both) and one is a shorter version of the other. The current domain is over 10 years old and has a domain authority score of 80. It is 9 characters long. The new domain (which they also own) has a DA score of 43 and is only 3 characters long. The debate is as much about branding as anything but there is a concern on how it will affect search. I was hoping for so advice and any pitfalls others may have experienced. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2comarketing0