New Domain Name For an Old Site

[ccbamatx]

This post is deleted!

[emarketexperts]

Yes you are right, you will loose all the PR and other things you gained over years for old domain. You cant take it back . Though 301 redirect is a permanent redirect it only passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected pages. And regarding your question whether Google treat new as an extension of the old? , I don't think so.

[David-Kley]

"will Google simply view the new as an extension of the old -i.e a part of it"

Google will see the new entity as a new website, even with the redirects. They will crawl all the new pages, and assign it rank based upon the quality score of the content, SEO, backlinks, etc etc.

The redirects can help with passing juice from one site to another, but as already stated they do not pass the full amount. The most helpful part of a redirect is for users, so when you change your website you can still be found.

I would see what the old domain has going for it. Look up the domain age, backlinks acquired through the years, social and citation links, current rankings, etc. Look for reasons to keep it.

In my experience, even if you do all your redirects perfectly and catch every single page, you will still see some form of ranking loss temporarily while Google indexes the new site. Seems like it throws them off for a while.

All that being said, if the new domain is catchy, easy for users to remember and has a keyword or two in the domain name, it may be worth it to change. I think it all depends how much work you want to do to get the new domain rocking.

[ccbamatx]

Thanks for your help...

[ccbamatx]

Hello David,

Thanks for your response. In fact the only thing that the old site has going for it is that it has been up for over 6 years. Not much SEO work was done to it at all and it currently has a Domain Authority of 11 and a Page Authority of 21.

In terms of how much weight Google gives to the age of the domain (of which I have no idea), and the above current rankings, do you think it is a good idea to keep the old domain name? The new domain does not have any KW's in it and is simply the designer's name.com.

Thanks in advance....

[irvingw]

Never change domain names unless it is no longer the companies name, or in case of a massive penalty. I've seen so many sites do this and lose all of their traffic. Also, if the new site is a different architecture there are important SEO considerations to make sure you retain as mush PR and traffic as possible.

[ccbamatx]

Irving,  thanks very much for your reply.

As of this morning, I believe we're going to stick with the original domain name.

Regarding the site architecture for the new site, it is different from the old one. While both sites are for an interior designer and are similar in content, the architecture of the new site is much more involved. Would you be able to direct me to any posts that address the specific SEO issues that need to be addressed when replacing the old site with the new?

Thank sin advance..

[irvingw]

There are many potential issues that can occur if the newly coded site is not done under proper SEO supervision, such as:

• not correctly 301'ing the old urls to the new ones
• unintentional duplicate content issues
• pagination issues resulting in unwanted pages getting indexed
• sitemap xml files not coded properly
• site structure not passing page juice properly
• switching over from old server to new
• difference in on page optimization
• improper coding of robots.txt (unintentional blocking or blocking too much)
• improper coding of schema markup, or other coding errors
• implementing a CMS or platform that doesn't allow enough SEO flexibility
• poorly written urls without keyword targets in the file names
• poorly optimized images and alt tags
• possible coding issies causing google to not be able to read sections of content on the site
• server performance / page speed times that is worse than the old site's performance
• less effective user experience resulting in higher bounce rate and less time spent on site
• unintentionally allowing https pages or non www (or www depending on preference) pages to get indexed in addition to the main intended site
• HUGE mistake i have seen a lot of times, forgetting to completely block the dev version of the site, and google seeing your site and the dev as as identical indexed sites

[ccbamatx]

Irving, thanks once again for your thoughtful response.