Web address change - Search impact?

[luwhosjack]

Hi,

I have whosjack.org and wjlondon.com - on there is a London relevant news and events website. whosjack.org has been the main site for some time and has decent search pick up. Currently wjlondon.com just redirects to whosjack.org. However - having london in our actual address would be far more beneficial for us.

So ideally I want to swap the two web addresses around. Have the main site at wjlondon and have whosjack redirecting to it. However - I don't want to loose traffic from search.

An idea I had was to create a sept site at wjLondon that was a feed of social content and links from whosjack so that it starts to get a decent search and then swap them over but not sure whether that would actually be detrimental what with all the dupe content issues with google etc.

Any thoughts?

[BlueprintMarketing]

You need to make sure you choice of website has google web master tools picked uk for country you are targeting. It would never hurt to add a .co.uk TDL to a domain but if one ranks well 301 redrect the others to it and make sure google knows what country you want to rank in.

You will have a up to 3 month drop in ranks from changing domains London will help you but so will .co.uk so if you do this use a .uk or .co.uk with london and know you will need to 301 redrect all links and you will lose traffic before you get more for 3 months or more

I hope this helps,

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you made a site that has the same words and is not ment for a nother country you will just hurt your self

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-change-your-domain-name-without-losing-your-rankings/

http://www.seo-theory.com/2013/04/08/does-changing-domain-name-affect-seo/

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

I see that it's whosjack.org that you have redirected to http://wjlondon.com/ at the moment, so I guess you have already done the migration? I see that you already have some internal pages indexed in whosjack.org, although you have also 301-redirected them to http://wjlondon.com/ (check if all the internal links go to the new URLs, also use the change of address option in Google Webmaster Tools).

Ideally, especially at the beginning, you should focus on a single domain, to consolidate your content and popularity. Additionally, you should avoid featuring the same content on two domains, since it would cause content duplication issues.

For domain migrations, take a look at these best practices, where I also link to other resources that will help you to plan and implement to minimize any errors and negative SEO impact.

I hope it helps!