Does Changing Domain Name Affect SEO?
I want to address three questions that recently brought people to the SEO Theory blog. They are all connected, although the people asking the questions may not have realized that. The first question is the one that intrigued me the most.
Does Changing the Domain Name Really Affect Your Search Engine Optimization?
Almost anyone with three or more years’ experience in the field should know by now that, of course changing the domain name will affect your SEO. But I don’t believe that is really the question these people mean to ask. I think they are looking for answers for a question more like, “Will changing my domain name affect my rankings/search engine optimization results”?
In other words, people don’t normally look at changing their domain names unless something compels them to. Maybe they have been told by The Company (or The Client) that the domain name is being changed and they have to make sure nothing bad happens. Maybe a merger has happened and an old domain is being folded into another. Maybe someone sold a domain but kept the content.
So, the first thing to understand is that not all domain name swaps are the same. If you retain control over the old domain (and you should plan on doing that for at least ten years) then you’ll want to implement 301-redirects to ensure that the link value pointing at old content is transferred to the new domain. Don’t even hope that you can get all the old links changed. That’s a real waste of time.
On the other hand, if you’re selling the domain name and have to start over for some reason, you can kiss the link value good-bye. Sure, you might get a lot of the old links changed but that’s a lot of work. Nonetheless I have known some people who sold their domains and kept the content. They really wanted to keep those links coming in.
Frankly, I would forget about the old links, even if they are only 2 weeks old. When you’re launching a new domain you will have your hands full just teaching people to search for the right domain. You will need NEW links anyway. If you sell the domain and keep the content there is no practical way to bring the link value with you. But if the content was really that good then who is to say it won’t attract new links if you republish it carefully in a measured pace?
In fact, I have attracted new links after republishing my old Suite101 articles from more than ten years ago. I’ve done that at least twice. So moving content to a new domain doesn’t mean you have lost all link value forever. In fact, quite the opposite. Most links don’t last as long as content and yet people in the SEO industry continue to invest more time and effort in obtaining links than in managing content. Talk about being inefficient!
In short, changing your domain name will indeed affect your SEO — that is, your search referral traffic — at least temporarily while the search engines get the redirects sorted out and permanently if you’re not able to redirect old URLs. Either way, if you continue to work on the site and produce good content you should recover any lost traffic in a reasonable length of time (3-6 months in my experience).
Should Your Domain Name Have Keywords?
Few ideas have been more misunderstood by the search engine optimization industry than use of keywords in the domain name. For years Internet marketers have told themselves, each other, and everyone else who will listen that “you have to have your keywords in your domain name”. Never mind the fact that Wikipedia continually kicked their keyword-ass domain names from here to Sunday 70 different ways.
Sure, in highly competitive verticals where every variation on the vanity keywords was used for domain registration even Wikipedia often struggled to appear on the front page of search results. But the magic secret was never in the domain name. After all, Google never said that keywords-in-domain-name was a ranking factor (and every time someone whined about “the exact match domain problem” Googlers were careful not to give credence to the idea that SEOs knew what they were talking about).
The reason why your EXAMPLE.COM domain ranked so well was that you spent all your time getting links that said “EXAMPLE” to point to your EXAMPLE.COM. Links may not be the most important part of the algorithm but they are the most important factor to many naive SEOs. When all you do is buy exact-match domain names and point keyword-rich anchor text at them you’re not going to see much benefit in doing anything else.
When Google finally rolled out its “Exact Match Domain name” update plenty of people with EMD Websites survived just fine. Why? Because they hadn’t invested solely in those keyword-rich anchors. Which is not to say that every affiliate spammer was nailed by the EMD update. I noticed several prominent affiliates who didn’t have a word of complaint about the EMD update.
Google went after the low-quality (by their standards) stuff as always. They don’t care if you use keywords in your domain name. If they did SEO-THEORY.COM and MICHAEL-MARTINEZ.COM wouldn’t rank for their vanity keywords.
Keywords-in-url was a helpful ranking factor for many years. If you had them in your domain name then you had them in your URL, but the algorithm was always looking at the URL. People who should know better have shown me their analytics data — packed with thousands of keywords sending traffic to their thousands of pages of content — and they pointed to the top results saying, “See? Keyword in domain name matters.”
I guess there is only so much room in an SEO noggin’ for revolutionary ideas and some idiot must have got in there first.
So, should your domain name have keywords? Actually, if you can get a short domain name with keywords it should help consumers remember the domain. But if you’re just buying cheap articles and slapping them on a WordPress site, putting all your emphasis on affiliate calls to action — well, it really doesn’t matter what you call the domain. IXQUIGGY.COM may still be available and at least that would be memorable.
Benefits of a Subdomain — Does Google Like Subdomains?
Google loves subdomains. They think subdomains are perfectly good Web constructions.
I really don’t understand the SEO obsession with subdomains. Either they are trying to stomp them out completely, yelling “subdomains are dead!’, or they are looking for ways to levearge subdomains into new advantages for search engine optimization.
If you want an advantage over the competition just browse Warrior Forum, WebmasterWorld, SEOmoz, SEOBook, SEO Chat, and every other popular SEO blog and forum. Write up a list of all their advice and then put that in the category of “DO NOT DO THIS SHIT.” Anything else will be offbeat enough that your competitors won’t have a clue what you’re doing.
Following the crowd — doing what everyone else is doing — endlessly following in the footsteps of people who share their cool ideas and discoveries with you keeps you in the rear. You’ll always be copying someone else hoping to repeat their success. And you’ll have plenty of company, too.
You can certainly argue that everyone needs to learn the basics somewhere, and doing what the SEO blogs and forums tell you to do should help you get up to speed. But when you have picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’s time to start climbing trees you’re going to find that “SEO 101″-grade advice just doesn’t cut the mustard.
The real stuff isn’t sitting in some private collection of archived SEO secrets — it’s waiting for you to figure it out on your own because each Website is different, each set of search results reacts differently, and everything changes over time.
I use subdomains all the time. I have never run into any of the nightmarish problems that other SEOs complain about. People search for my subdomains just as much as they search for my domains. That’s all brand-quality traffic. And my subdomains rank for thousands of useful searcher queries. That’s all long-tail traffic. And my subdomains get sitelinks, and show my picture, and do all that other cool SEO stuff that people make such a big fuss over.
I don’t use subdomains because they are the secret to success. Sure, they make some things easier (and less expensive) but I could just as easily use folders. It doesn’t matter.
The benefits a subdomain gives you are simple and straight-forward:
The subdomain is free. You don’t have to pay for it if you own the domain.
The subdomain lets you put keywords before the brand in the URL (if you care about that).
The subdomain can have its own completely isolated hosting account (more secure).
The subdomain can have its own IP address (might help with load management).
The subdomain can have its own design and navigation.
This is all money in the bank. But then, you can write up a list of the advantages of using folders and say the same thing: it’s all money in the bank.
The Real Question: How Important Is Domain Name for SEO?
This is really what people need to know. How important is the domain name for search engine optimization? Frankly, it’s not important at all. It never has been.
Domain names are important to people.
Search engine optimization simply has to support the business decision. You decide on domain name EXAMPLE.COM and then you work to promote it. Any competent SEO strategist can take a non-descript, generic domain name and build traffic for it in any set of keywords. The search engines don’t care. The search optimization process doesn’t care.
We pick domain names because we like them, because we believe in them, because we trust them. There is no SEO reason to use domain name ALPHA over domain name GAMMA.
So changing a domain name, or adding a subdomain, these actions don’t really affect your SEO. These are business decisions and your SEO supports them. That is no fine and subtle distinction — it’s an axiom. It just does not get any simpler than that.
I want to address three questions that recently brought people to the SEO Theory blog. They are all connected, although the people asking the questions may not have realized that. The first question is the one that intrigued me the most.
Does Changing the Domain Name Really Affect Your Search Engine Optimization?
Almost anyone with three or more years’ experience in the field should know by now that, of course changing the domain name will affect your SEO. But I don’t believe that is really the question these people mean to ask. I think they are looking for answers for a question more like, “Will changing my domain name affect my rankings/search engine optimization results”?
In other words, people don’t normally look at changing their domain names unless something compels them to. Maybe they have been told by The Company (or The Client) that the domain name is being changed and they have to make sure nothing bad happens. Maybe a merger has happened and an old domain is being folded into another. Maybe someone sold a domain but kept the content.
So, the first thing to understand is that not all domain name swaps are the same. If you retain control over the old domain (and you should plan on doing that for at least ten years) then you’ll want to implement 301-redirects to ensure that the link value pointing at old content is transferred to the new domain. Don’t even hope that you can get all the old links changed. That’s a real waste of time.
On the other hand, if you’re selling the domain name and have to start over for some reason, you can kiss the link value good-bye. Sure, you might get a lot of the old links changed but that’s a lot of work. Nonetheless I have known some people who sold their domains and kept the content. They really wanted to keep those links coming in.
Frankly, I would forget about the old links, even if they are only 2 weeks old. When you’re launching a new domain you will have your hands full just teaching people to search for the right domain. You will need NEW links anyway. If you sell the domain and keep the content there is no practical way to bring the link value with you. But if the content was really that good then who is to say it won’t attract new links if you republish it carefully in a measured pace?
In fact, I have attracted new links after republishing my old Suite101 articles from more than ten years ago. I’ve done that at least twice. So moving content to a new domain doesn’t mean you have lost all link value forever. In fact, quite the opposite. Most links don’t last as long as content and yet people in the SEO industry continue to invest more time and effort in obtaining links than in managing content. Talk about being inefficient!
In short, changing your domain name will indeed affect your SEO — that is, your search referral traffic — at least temporarily while the search engines get the redirects sorted out and permanently if you’re not able to redirect old URLs. Either way, if you continue to work on the site and produce good content you should recover any lost traffic in a reasonable length of time (3-6 months in my experience).
Should Your Domain Name Have Keywords?
Few ideas have been more misunderstood by the search engine optimization industry than use of keywords in the domain name. For years Internet marketers have told themselves, each other, and everyone else who will listen that “you have to have your keywords in your domain name”. Never mind the fact that Wikipedia continually kicked their keyword-ass domain names from here to Sunday 70 different ways.
Sure, in highly competitive verticals where every variation on the vanity keywords was used for domain registration even Wikipedia often struggled to appear on the front page of search results. But the magic secret was never in the domain name. After all, Google never said that keywords-in-domain-name was a ranking factor (and every time someone whined about “the exact match domain problem” Googlers were careful not to give credence to the idea that SEOs knew what they were talking about).
The reason why your EXAMPLE.COM domain ranked so well was that you spent all your time getting links that said “EXAMPLE” to point to your EXAMPLE.COM. Links may not be the most important part of the algorithm but they are the most important factor to many naive SEOs. When all you do is buy exact-match domain names and point keyword-rich anchor text at them you’re not going to see much benefit in doing anything else.
When Google finally rolled out its “Exact Match Domain name” update plenty of people with EMD Websites survived just fine. Why? Because they hadn’t invested solely in those keyword-rich anchors. Which is not to say that every affiliate spammer was nailed by the EMD update. I noticed several prominent affiliates who didn’t have a word of complaint about the EMD update.
Google went after the low-quality (by their standards) stuff as always. They don’t care if you use keywords in your domain name. If they did SEO-THEORY.COM and MICHAEL-MARTINEZ.COM wouldn’t rank for their vanity keywords.
Keywords-in-url was a helpful ranking factor for many years. If you had them in your domain name then you had them in your URL, but the algorithm was always looking at the URL. People who should know better have shown me their analytics data — packed with thousands of keywords sending traffic to their thousands of pages of content — and they pointed to the top results saying, “See? Keyword in domain name matters.”
I guess there is only so much room in an SEO noggin’ for revolutionary ideas and some idiot must have got in there first.
So, should your domain name have keywords? Actually, if you can get a short domain name with keywords it should help consumers remember the domain. But if you’re just buying cheap articles and slapping them on a WordPress site, putting all your emphasis on affiliate calls to action — well, it really doesn’t matter what you call the domain. IXQUIGGY.COM may still be available and at least that would be memorable.
Benefits of a Subdomain — Does Google Like Subdomains?
Google loves subdomains. They think subdomains are perfectly good Web constructions.
I really don’t understand the SEO obsession with subdomains. Either they are trying to stomp them out completely, yelling “subdomains are dead!’, or they are looking for ways to levearge subdomains into new advantages for search engine optimization.
If you want an advantage over the competition just browse Warrior Forum, WebmasterWorld, SEOmoz, SEOBook, SEO Chat, and every other popular SEO blog and forum. Write up a list of all their advice and then put that in the category of “DO NOT DO THIS SHIT.” Anything else will be offbeat enough that your competitors won’t have a clue what you’re doing.
Following the crowd — doing what everyone else is doing — endlessly following in the footsteps of people who share their cool ideas and discoveries with you keeps you in the rear. You’ll always be copying someone else hoping to repeat their success. And you’ll have plenty of company, too.
You can certainly argue that everyone needs to learn the basics somewhere, and doing what the SEO blogs and forums tell you to do should help you get up to speed. But when you have picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’s time to start climbing trees you’re going to find that “SEO 101″-grade advice just doesn’t cut the mustard.
The real stuff isn’t sitting in some private collection of archived SEO secrets — it’s waiting for you to figure it out on your own because each Website is different, each set of search results reacts differently, and everything changes over time.
I use subdomains all the time. I have never run into any of the nightmarish problems that other SEOs complain about. People search for my subdomains just as much as they search for my domains. That’s all brand-quality traffic. And my subdomains rank for thousands of useful searcher queries. That’s all long-tail traffic. And my subdomains get sitelinks, and show my picture, and do all that other cool SEO stuff that people make such a big fuss over.
I don’t use subdomains because they are the secret to success. Sure, they make some things easier (and less expensive) but I could just as easily use folders. It doesn’t matter.
The benefits a subdomain gives you are simple and straight-forward:
The subdomain is free. You don’t have to pay for it if you own the domain.
The subdomain lets you put keywords before the brand in the URL (if you care about that).
The subdomain can have its own completely isolated hosting account (more secure).
The subdomain can have its own IP address (might help with load management).
The subdomain can have its own design and navigation.
This is all money in the bank. But then, you can write up a list of the advantages of using folders and say the same thing: it’s all money in the bank.
The Real Question: How Important Is Domain Name for SEO?
This is really what people need to know. How important is the domain name for search engine optimization? Frankly, it’s not important at all. It never has been.
Domain names are important to people.
Search engine optimization simply has to support the business decision. You decide on domain name EXAMPLE.COM and then you work to promote it. Any competent SEO strategist can take a non-descript, generic domain name and build traffic for it in any set of keywords. The search engines don’t care. The search optimization process doesn’t care.
We pick domain names because we like them, because we believe in them, because we trust them. There is no SEO reason to use domain name ALPHA over domain name GAMMA.
So changing a domain name, or adding a subdomain, these actions don’t really affect your SEO. These are business decisions and your SEO supports them. That is no fine and subtle distinction — it’s an axiom. It just does not get any simpler than that.