Hi, I've just finished building my first website. It’s a classified adds website and when I started building it I didn't think name relevance is that important. I still don’t want to have a domain name like classifieds.com as I want to build a brand with its own identity. Now I am thinking of buying a domain like classifieds-example.com and transfer the whole content of example.com to it for SEO purposes. I will keep the example.com and do 301 redirect so when identity will have been build it will still be easily accessible to the users familiar with the name. I was thinking to have classifieds-example.com added as an addon domain on my hosting account. All the SEO will be done to classifieds-example.com. At the moment there is no traffic, ranking or anything of that sort on the website. Are there any risks on doing that? Is it a simple enough thing to do? How do I do that? Thank you!
You need to play with .htaccess to redirect from one domain to another. If your hosting has Cpanel you can setup a simplistic 301 redirect or you can browse for advanced .htaccess redirection rules to avoid duplicity or redirect to index if a missing or changed link is setup during the move. On a side note, if I would have example.com and classified-example.com I would keep example.com because of the shorter name
Thanks for your answer! It makes sense! I just didnt know where to start from. I will keep the example.com domain and redirect it to classified-example.com because in time I hope to become a brand and have users know me for example.com rather than classifieds-example.com. It is just for SEO purposes that I want to do this change anyway! So thank you for taking your time to help me out!