Hello, For reasons too long to explain, I had to change my domain name recently. And for SEO sake that's a hell of a problem. I've been workin VERY hard on SEO for my site the last few years and managed to be on top of Google for many, many excellent search terms (in my country and language it is). But now of course the thousands of archived pages (mostly identical to those on my previous domain name) will of course never rank as before, altough I just changed '.be' into '.net'. Is there a way to force some kind of ... well ... transfer within Google (and other SE)? Probably not, says my logic, but I still hope there are some smart guys and girls on this forum who may have encountered that same brainteaser in the past. Parsi
If you still control the old domain name, the ideal solution is to setup 301 redirects for every page. That would transfer the links, PR & rankings to the new domain. If you no longer have control over the old domain, you might be out of luck. You may essentially be starting from scratch. If you do have to start from scratch, you will have to somehow resolve the duplicate content issue...either get all new content or remove it from the old domain.
vansterdam is correct. When you change the URL for a page (change it's domain, change what folder it's in, change the page name, etc.) you should 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL (in your case www.example.be/page.html --> 301 redirect --> www.example.net/page.html) for every URL with inbound links. If you still control the old domain and use Apache, you should have access to several Apache utilities including Mod Rewrite which make implementing the site-wide redirects a breeze... You can redirect EVERY page on the old domain to the same page name on the new domain with basically a single rewrite rule. Something like the following should work: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} example.be$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.net/$1 [R=301,L] That should redirect all page requests for http://example.be/* or http://www.example.be/* to http://www.example.net/* Once Google recrawls all the inbound links from other sites and discovers each of the redirects, the new URLs will get credit for the old URLs' inbound links and link text transfering the old pages' PR to the new pages. But this can take a couple months for things to get back to normal.
From what I read from the previous posters, this means, as I feared, that I am in deep sh**. In fact my domain name was stolen and I'm unable to recover it. Fortunately I had a copy of the tons of pages, but now this simply means double content. And since there is no question of 'adapting' those articles that are too contextual and actuality related... I can only hope i'll get up again in the long term with my daily updates
Oh yes, and this may be a SEO lesson #very high, that I never read before in this forum: NEVER EVER trust anyone when you start earning money with a website.
I have a site that is about 1.5 years old. I've got a fair amount of links pointing to it, but it hasn't done so well. The domain is not very good and I have the opportunity to secure a more brandable domain (also keyword friendly). Does it make sense to move to the new domain? I have full control over the old site, so will all my links eventually follow to the new domain if I 301. Any downside to doing this?
I don't understand, how can your domain get stolen? Have you spoken your registrar? You can submit proof of ownership if any and they can really help you with it. You should try it out. If you have owned the domain for the last few years and worked hard on it, it is a shame you have to loose the domain like that. It is like starting out afresh.