Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?
-
I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name.
Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com
OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains)
NEW one is curently on 0
The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name.
this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible??
A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O
B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content?
Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases.
Thanks!
-
Hi Tamir,
Matt has already done a great job in answering this and I would add just a small side note - my guess for the new domain came from someone reading that keyword matching between domains and content was a great way to get better results in SERPs. It's antiquated thinking but that's what it looks like (adding "travel" to the domain in the hopes that potential customers would better understand what they were all about).
As Matt said, the big issue is the way the redirects were handled (should be 301'd to a similar site structure for the smallest possible rankings impact). If you were to create a site structure similar to that found on the previous site, you would probably see a return to those traffic levels (or close) fairly quickly. Another method might be to re-institute the previous site by reloading the site map on the old domain (there are tools for this). This would permit you to use the old site until you could get a proper site structure set up for the new one.
You don't have to move back to the previous website permanently, but it wouldn't be a bad idea until to have sorted out what you want to do with the new site moving forward. A properly-executed 301 redirect should cost you between 1-3% of your overall link juice.
Hope this helps a bit.
Rob
-
The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.
As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect - this old Q&A you might find interesting.
http://azwa.1clkaccess.in/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect
If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.
Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/
I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.
On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.
Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps
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
-
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Why is Google ranking irrelevant / not preferred pages for keywords?
Over the past few months we have been chipping away at duplicate content issues. We know this is our biggest issue and is working against us. However, it is due to this client also owning the competitor site. Therefore, product merchandise and top level categories are highly similar, including a shared server. Our rank is suffering major for this, which we understand. However, as we make changes, and I track and perform test searches, the pages that Google ranks for keywords never seems to match or make sense, at all. For example, I search for "solid scrub tops" and it ranks the "print scrub tops" category. Or the "Men Clearance" page is ranking for keyword "Women Scrub Pants". Or, I will search for a specific brand, and it ranks a completely different brand. Has anyone else seen this behavior with duplicate content issues? Or is it an issue with some other penalty? At this point, our only option is to test something and see what impact it has, but it is difficult to do when keywords do not align with content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Any tips on how tp get reddit or pinterest posts rank high on google images?
Hello I have noticed that for a keyword that has high competition it has on top image searches not that popular pinterest post & a reddit post, explorergram , youtube etc., the keywork is "24k gold iphone" and I am wondering if I could create somehow myself a pinterest or reddit post or something similar that would have images with my product rank high on that keyword, since my website does not rank well in mage search for some reason... https://www.google.fi/search?q=24k+gold+iphone+6&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMI1f2LkpTxxgIVhI8sCh1SGwjy&biw=978&bih=550#tbm=isch&q=24k+gold+iphone thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others. But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches. At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Company name causing Google penalty?
Hi all, Once of my clients has a keyword as part of their company name, and it seems like the website is being given a penalty in the keyword SERP because of the amount of websites linking back using the company name? Is there anything i can do to prevent/balance this out? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyHall0