301'ing away from an exact match domain.

[howiex1]

Hi Moz Community!

My website gets just over 50% of its traffic from ranking in the top 3 in over 10 countries for my exact match keyword domain. 80% + from keywords related to the exact match domain.

We are now looking at doing a to 301 re-direct to a new domain to start a fresh branding to the site to increase scope and expand. This would involve removing the keyword from the homepage and domain entirely . However. Considering all competitors ranking for our main keyword, have the keyword in their domain as either a subdomain to or in their root domain and in their homepage content, would this make ranking without the keyword in domain & content hard? I have found a very similar example that has done so, so I guess the answer to that question is no its not.

about 65-70% of our anchor text on our backlinks is for our domain keyword.

Can anyone advise how best to go about maintaining rankings after 301ing or how best to go about 301ing to make sure that we can maintain the rankings for our main keyword!

Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks.

[Francisco_Meza]

Sub domains do not give a ranking boost. While I was a subscriber at SEObook, Aaron Wall put it like this:

creditcards.com = boost

creditcards.example.com = crap

cardscredit.com = crap

Don't worry about KW in the domain. If you can't rank any other way than to rely on the KW being in your domain, you don't deserve to rank. If I were your competitor, then all I would need to do is get some real FB URL Likes and a couple okay external links.

If you are going to 301, make sure you have your .htaccess ready to go ahead of time. Also re-submit your old sitemap in GWT 1st so it crawls your site and notices the 301s. Then submit your new sitemap.

[howiex1]

Thanks for your response Francisco,

Do you have any comment on removing the keyword from the homepage content?

Also, I highly doubt that its an over 8 million exact search keyword. One or two competitors I would probably side with your argument, but everyone on the top page can't be wrong.

We would be 301'ing from domain.com to domain.com, not to a subdomain. That was just reference to the competitors on first page serps.

[Francisco_Meza]

I recommend to do two things. 1st follow your business objectives. If you really don't have any, then try writing it out. 2nd, and equally as important, optimize for your audience, not for Google. When I hear newbies talk about putting KWs in h1 tags and domains, they are thinking the wrong way. Don't be like me. I wasted time trying to optimize my website so much that it was over-optimized and unreadable.

I stand by my statement, KW in subdomains do not give a boost. If it did, all of us on MOZ would have done that years ago. It would have also created a lot of spam sites.

Do you have any comment on removing the keyword from the homepage content?

I don't know what your GA says. That's your call. If the keyword is not as relevant, then no. All the sites I have ever built had a home page that was about all the landing pages. Go to my site and study it (the shipping one).

[MoosaHemani]

Re-branding is great and 301ing from existing domain to the new one is also a good idea for this but always remember whenever you do a 301 from one domain to another domain there is always a small loss of link juice which might cause a fluctuation for few or many of your ranking position in Google.

In my opinion the idea is not bad but tries to plan a strategy that aloe you to gain some quick and high quality link in that case so that it can minimize the ranking loss due to 301redirection.

**do not go for subdomain

**As far as not using a keyword in the new domain..I would always recommend you to do some competitor analysis for this and do not remove the keyword from the domain if most of the competitors are sung it as I still have an observation that Google give less (but still a value) to domain that contain keyword in it!

Hope this helps!