Where should I 301 redirect my current domain to given this situation?
-
My company currently owns three apartment complexes. They are within blocks of each other. Only one of them has a website (believe it or not). The one that has the website ranks fairly well, but only because it has been around for a long time. There have not been any intentional SEO efforts. I have stumbled across a wonderful, keyword rich & location specific, domain name but I have a question. Here's the scenario:
We have:
Apartment Complex 1 - www.apartmentcomplex1.com (longstanding website)
Apartment Complex 2 - No website.
Apartment Complex 3 - No website.
We are considering buying the domain: www.KeywordRichDomain.com. The new URL structure would be:
www.KeywordRichDomain.com/apartment-complex-1
www.KeywordRichDomain.com/apartment-complex-2
www.KeywordRichDomain.com/apartment-complex-3
Should I 301 redirect www.apartmentcomplex1.com to the new root domain or should I redirect it to the appropriate sub-folder of the new domain?
Putting myself in the user's shoes, if I were expecting to go to the apartmentcomplex1.com domain, I would want to land on the sub-folder because it's relevant to what I was looking for. However, I don't think people will directly type in the old URL. I think people will be searching for apartments in the area and I want all three of our complexes to show up. By redirecting the good domain to this new root domain, it should help us start out life pretty well in the SERPS. (my assumption at least).
Thoughts?
-
George,
Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you that exact match domains are likely becoming less significant, but I thought I remembered from MozCon that case studies, as of that date (earlier this year), proved that EMDs were still resulting in clearly higher rankings. I'll have to go back to the videos.
I agree with you about the age assumption. I wasn't stating that the age, itself, was the ranking factor. I meant that because it had been around for so long that natural optimizations were occurring (natural linking, natural content, etc...). This wasn't intentional though. It just occurred through the normal course of business. According to the MozBar, while on the home page, it has a Domain Authority of 19 and a Page Authority of 31 with 266 links coming in from 13 root domains.
Thank you for sharing about the Google Webmaster tools restriction. I was unaware of that, but it makes sense. I could see why that would be abused, even though in this case I have a legitimate reason for doing so. I will ensure that clear navigation is in place on the home page.
Thanks again George!
-Alex
-
Hi,
I see a couple of assumptions in your question - I would say that having a "keyword rich domain" is becoming a less significant ranking factor in SERPs so I wouldn't base the migration of an existing website that performs pretty well on the potential of a new domain targetting certain KWs.
Secondl assumption is that your existing domain is ranking purely because it's older. There are likely to be other factors at play here - particularly backlinks.
However, I realise that you need to restructure the website and moving to a single domain with the complexes on subdirectories makes sense architecturally. You might well see a drop in rankings certainly in the meantime while you do this migration so if this is a key acquisiton channel, then investigate PPC options to bolster your traffic.
As for the 301 - I agree it makes sense to 301 to the complex subdirectory for a user, however in Webmaster Tools Google doesn't support the migration of one domain to the subdirectory of another domain. This means it won't be as seamless as if you migrate to the root of the new domain.
One way around this would be to redirect the old domain to the root domain, but provide very clear navigation on how to get to the relevant apartment complex to a user. As far as a user is concerned, I would see this as an acceptable solution.
George
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
-
What's the current best practice for URL structure?
We’re really confused about the current best practice of URL structure. For example what would anyone advise to rank for luxury hotel rooms? name.com/luxury-hotel-rooms/
Local Website Optimization | | SolveWebMedia
name.com/hotel/luxury-hotel-rooms/
name.com/hotel/luxury-rooms/
name.com/hotel/luxury/
name.com/luxury-rooms/ Or do we add location? name.com/luxury-hotel-rooms-location/
name.com/hotel/luxury-hotel-rooms-location/ name.com/hotel/luxury-rooms-location/ They also do cottages name.com/cottages/sea-view-holiday-cottages/0 -
How difficult is it to rank an exact match domain nowadays in 2017?
Hey there Mozzers! It's been a while since I've been back around these parts after working at a search agency many moons ago. I remember way back how it was stupidly easy to rank for something like "date ideas toronto" when I had an exact match domain www.cheapdateideas.ca and dateideas.ca (which I still own). Anyhow, I've been looking to build up my domain www.dateideas.net with hyper local date ideas and essentially looking to build this for the long term and expand after I hit a certain critical mass in terms of high quality content mostly written by myself to start. Eventually, if it makes sense, hiring authors or getting guest contributors to contribute to the blog if there's enough incentive to do so (which I'll figure out at some point). Question for y'all for a newbie that was semi-pro and now all my knowledge from before isn't so cutting edge. How would you guys approach it. I am looking to build this for the long haul, so it may very well be that some of your answers are "write amazing content", I'll be okay with that answer. Cheers, Will
Local Website Optimization | | will_l1 -
Should I open a new domain and website for a new location under one company?
Hi my name is Gina and I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm thinking opening a diff location and was thinking if its a good idea to open up a new domain and new website? And why that may be a good idea and why or a bad idea and why?
Local Website Optimization | | LittleDog0 -
Closed Location Pages - 301 to open locations?
I work with several thousand local businesses and have a listing page for each on my site. Recently a large chunk of these locations closed, and a number of these pages rank well for localized keywords. I'm trying to figure out the best course of action.
Local Website Optimization | | Andrew_Mac
What I've done so far is make a note on each of the closed location pages that says something to the effect of "This location is currently closed. Here are some nearby options" and provide links to the location pages of 3 open places nearby. The closed location pages are continuing to rank well, but conversion rates from visitors landing on these pages has dropped. What I'm considering doing is 301ing these pages to the nearest open location page. I'm hoping this will preserve the ranking of the page for keywords for which the nearby location is still relevant, while not hurting user experience by serving up a closed location. I'm also thinking of, as a second step, creating new pages (with slightly altered URLs) for the closed listings. They won't rank as well obviously, but if someone searches for the address or even the street of the closed location, my hope is that I could still capture some of that traffic and hope to convert it through someone clicking through to an open location from there. I spoke with someone about this second step and he thought it sounded spammy. My thinking is, combined with the 301, I'm telling Google that the page it is currently ranking well no longer has the importance it once did and that the page I'm 301ing to does, but that the content on the page I'm creating for the closed location still has enough value to justify the newly created page. I'd really appreciate thoughts from the community on this. Thanks!0 -
Whats in a domain name in terms of SE ranking.
I'm curious. Whats in a domain name in terms of search engine ranking and keyword searches. Let me provide an example: If I sell umbrellas in New York City and my company name is Rainy Day Umbrellas am I wise to register both rainydayumbrellas.com and newyorkumbrellas.com as a way of targeting my customers and ranking better in a single search phrase for that subject? Second question. If it is a good idea do you just forward that domain to the primary site or have a second mirrored site? Or perhaps just a landing page?
Local Website Optimization | | Bvrettski0 -
Hosting Change & It's Impact on SERP Performance (with a Side of Domain Migration)
Hi everyone, I've read a lot on forums about the topic of hosting and it's impact on SEO, but I've seen conflicting opinions. I wanted to see if anyone might have a definitive answer for this scenario: Our parent company is based in the EU and wants to move our English domain to their site -- either as part of the main .com or potentially as a new subdomain. One of those things is going to happen; it's just a question of which one. One issue I have is that they host their .com with content targeting English speakers (mostly in the U.S.) in France, so if we moved our content to their site we'd be going from our existing domain hosted in the U.S. (with the majority of visitors coming from the U.S.) to a site that's hosted in France. I've read that folders are still usually better over subdomains in terms of passing the strength of the domain on to pages. So... would it be better to have a subdomain hosted in the U.S., or just have folders under the main domain, but that content would be hosted in France? Our existing domain and the domain we'll be moving to are about even in terms of domain authority and size. Happy to get any feedback you might have. Anyone come across any case studies on this particular topic that would be helpful? Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | SafeNet_Interactive_Marketing0 -
Sub-Domain Google Search Nested under main Domain?
Hello, I have a strange issue that I have not come across before:My subdomain is: michigan.dogdaycare.com. Some of the Keyword searches show our subdomain being nested under the main domain for Google searches instead of being indexed individually. Example search term: Dogtopia Bloomfield https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+bloomfield -This will show two subdomain links nested under the main domain Example search term: Dogtopia Birmingham https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=dogtopia+birmingham -This shows the subdomain showing correctly in searches and not nested. Any idea as to how to fix this? Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | dogtopiamichigan0 -
Multi Location business - Should I 301 redirect duplicate location pages or alternatively No Follow tag them ?
Hello All, I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content. All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well. We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search. Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page. I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?.. I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword. An Alternative I thought, may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?... What do you think ?. It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120