Moving from www.domain.net to domain.com?

[mschianoyo]

We're thinking about moving our domain from www.domain.net to domain.com as we just acquired the dot com domain.  www.domain.net receives roughly 20million pageviews per month and gets about 90% of it's traffic from search engines.

What is best to do in this situation?

1. Should we start using .com instead of .net?  301 redirecting traffic to the .com from .net?
2. Should we drop the www in front?

[Francisco_Meza]

1. If you do a redirect expect a drop in traffic. Rand says that there might be a 10% drop in some video I watched long ago.

2. www vs non-www is irrelevant to me. I do both (not on the same domain). www looks nicer because we are used to seeing it like that.

[mschianoyo]

Thanks for your response.

1. would you say long term we're better off using .com?  so do we sacrifice a potential 10% drop today for a 20% increase tomorrow?

2. is it relevant for SEO though if we switch?

[Francisco_Meza]

1. I don't think it's temporary or permanent. Although I think it's easier to remember the .com over .net version. I wonder how many people go to the .com instead/

2. Irrelevant to SEO. Just make sure one points to the other. Don't have both at the same time.

[mschianoyo]

1. about 8k uniques per month

[MoosaHemani]

301 redirection from old to anew domain will lose some of its juice so this will affect your rankings in search engine which will have a direct impact on your traffic. 301 redirection is the right choice but tray to plan a link and social strategy that you can implement right after the redirections and this will control the juice loss.

Dropping www is your choice, but keep that in mind that do not run two versions of the URL so decide first which version of the website you will be using and then redirect 301 all the other versions of URL to the preferred one.

[KarlBantleman]

Make sure that when you are migrating the URL's across that you get all the current URL's and redirect them to the equivalent on the new domain. Don't just 301 everything to the homepage as I've seen people do before!

In terms of the www. and non www, I always say to use www. because it looks better and more professional in my opinion, just 301 redirect the non. www to the www version.

[Francisco_Meza]

Michael, I don't know if switching from the .net to .com would be the best solution. With 2 million page views per month, you're possibly talking about a big amount of traffic gone. It sounds like you have a well established website.

here is why. authorize.net is already branded as a company. If they were to become authorize.com, I would literally type into the browser authorize.net.

If you make the switch, expect to lose a little rankings. You can always make it up later to get back to 2 million page views per month.

[mschianoyo]

20million pageviews, so even a larger impact -- which is why we're incredibly nervous!

I think we may just point the .com to the .net address for now.  We're not branded as company-dot-net so we're often told, "hey i went to company.com and i didnt see your site!" which is a major annoyance.

Our other problem is our URLs.  Today, they look like domain.net/category/node/ID-number ... we were thinking about moving to domain.net/content-page-title/ but not sure if its worth it since our URLs are so indexed in google.

Thanks again for your input with all of this

[mschianoyo]

Can you kindly give me an example of "plan a link and social strategy"? Just not sure what you mean exactly.

[Njave_MCP]

Wouldn't recommend it! Just simply 301 the .com to .net and you're done. What's the use of doing it all? I mean with that amount of traffic you shouldn't be worrying about such trivial things. And in my experience, difference between those two is simply with direct traffic. Which accounts for how much of the access numbers? Simply put, you would be wasting a lot of time and money for it. But that's just my opinion on the matter.

[mschianoyo]

I wanted to update everyone on this.

We switched move to .com from .net.  301s were all in place.  No other changes.

We've lost about 30% of search traffic.  Within the last two weeks, traffic has leveled off -- it's been flat so I'm expecting that the worst is over.  WMT is showing a boatload of our urls getting reindexed which makes me feel a bit better.

Here's to a rebound these next few weeks!

[mschianoyo]

Just following up again for anyone who has stumbled on this.

We recovered to about 95% of where we were before the domain tld switch in late September.  We've been climbing ever since too.

[KeriMorgret]

Woohoo! Thanks for the update! If you have any lessons learned or a case study you think the community could benefit from reading, feel free to submit over at YouMoz.

http://moz.com/blog/inside-youmoz-how-to-guest-blog-for-moz