Hello, I have a website that has a couple of keywords in the domain for our niche. We are not an internet marketing company but rather a training company. We are changing our website to use Word Press. This is the perfect time to address this question. I think there is a bit of a disconnect when people land on our site via AdWords or organic searches. My thinking was to use a 301 re-direct from our 'old' site to our 'new' Word Press site that is branded with our company name. I want to keep as much link juice as I can from my old site. The old site also has a bunch of spammy links which is another reason I want to move away from it. (I bought some links from Fiverr). I hope I explained this well enough. Shall I keep the old domain or move forward with my branding and go to our 'company name' domain? Thanks for the input! Cheers, Dave
The spammy links from fiverr isn't harmful for you website. The max penalty google gives, is to drop the value from the links to zero. I'll make 301-redirects from ALL old URLS, to all new URLS. Its important that you do it with all urls, and not only to the frontpage. Ex. keyword.tld/test1 -> newdomain.tld/test1 keyword.tld/test2 -> newdomain.tld/test2 keyword.tld/test3 -> newdomain.tld/test3 NOT : keyword.tld/test1 -> newdomain.tld keyword.tld/test2 -> newdomain.tld keyword.tld/test3 -> newdomain.tld But be prepared that you might will lose a little in the rankings! So after a switch you might build extra links to the new domain.
I wrote "That much" that for me means that's not a big difference, and many other things is better to do. There's a lot of things that is better to do. But your right, if you nothing do and only set up two URLS then the keyword domain will rank better on the keyword. But onpages SEO, linkbuilding etc is more effective. And second mind, the effect of having a business branding with a brand domain is good! And i'd tested it too!
If you've really concerned about spam, then i would suggest you to not take the risks. Go with new and do involve in the quality SEO process only (never try any black hat seo techniques).