What Domain should I use? - Domain authority question

[Tmgale]

Hi all,

I created a website www.bruadair.com approximately 2 months ago, the website is for a luxury villa. Prior to creating this site the villa website was www.bruadair.co.uk , this website had been live for around 4 years.

Now after developing the site and creating optimised content etc, I started my link building strategy to try and increase both the page and domain authority of the site. I used MOZ's open site explorer tool to examine my site and compared it with the old domain (www.bruadair.co.uk), this is was where my question arose.

The old site has a domain authority of 16/100 and the home page has a page authority of 26/100. The old domain also had 468 inbound links ( the quality of these are most likely questionable, nofollows etc ). The new site in comparison has 1/100 domain authority and 1/100 page authority with no apparent inbound links.

Before I noticed this I had generated a few inbound links to the new site, but Moz had not indexed websites since I had done this therefore it probably wouldn't have shown it in the open site explorer.

Basically I have cloned the new site to the old web address and am thinking of using the .co.uk version just due to its existing domain and page authority. Would it be beneficial to swap over to the old site to benefit from the domain authority??

Thanks for any help given!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Honestly  a domain authority of 16 is not very much at all. So if you're business is located in the UK which from going to be URL ending in co.uk it is I would stick with that.

I also took the liberty of running that domain through majesticSEO as well as SERPS.com which combines every tool but majestic is on the fritz right now however are utilized tools the utilize  majesticSEO, Moz & Ahrefs

I can tell you that the .Co.uk domain is a stronger domain however it's very weak and in terms of actual value. You could with a proper SEO campaign bring either domain to a very high level.

There are benefits to using geo-based TLD's if you are basing this business out of the UK I would stick with the UK domain.

Currently this site seems to be having issues but if you go to the tools part of http://serps.com/  you can get all the information I have pasted below for free it's quite convenient.

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.bruadair.co.uk

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.bruadair.com

https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/bruadair.co.uk?oq=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bruadair.co.uk%2F&IndexDataSource=F

https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/top-backlinks?folder=&q=bruadair.com&oq=bruadair.com&IndexDataSource=F

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.bruadair.co.uk

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.bruadair.com

I would build on the better domain and make sure the back links are very relevant to the contents of the website.

If you were to swap it as you say you would need to do a 301 redirect on every inbound link that would be relevant to your new site. You would lose a small amount of link juice or power however you could do that if you wish.

If it's not broken don't fix it is my attitude on this if you do want to use the .com it should not be hard to get it to the same rank as the other domain.

I hope I have been of help,

Thomas

[Tmgale]

Thank you Thomas, a very thorough and helpful answer!

I have been promoting and focusing on linkinbuilding in the .com site as of the last few weeks, I am aware that these efforts take time to materialise. If it is the case that there is not much difference between the two , then i will just stick with .com. We operate in England but our Villa is in Barbados and is promoted internationally and so I don't believe .co.uk is particularly useful.

The main difference between the two sites was that the co.uk  version had been running for 4 years (not by me) and so I thought it may had developed some good ( be it unintentional ) authority. Whereas i have only had .com up and running properly for around a month. I suppose I might as well continue on trying to build quality links to the .com site,

To clarify, when you mention that the site has issues you would be referring the co.uk one?

Thanks again for your respone!!

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think the fact that you're running a good link campaign on the.com definitely assures me that you're in the right you should continue to build links towards the.com and use that as a clean slate.

Yes I ment the .co.uk has some problems.

good pick.

Glad I could be of help,

Thomas