404 Group

As a general rule, it is far better to keep an established domain name than it is to get a new one and move your website to it. There are exceptions.

Why keep the old domain name? The search engines give a lot of consideration to the age of a domain name when deciding how to rank a website and where to place it in search results. How much is a lot? That’s hard to say, but over the past six years, as I have been doing organic SEO, I have often found websites showing up on the second page of search results (or worse!) after sites that have less relevant content, are poorly designed, have fewer inbound links from other websites, haven’t utilized basic on-page SEO tactics and basically left me scratching my head until I checked the age of their domains. In many, many instances I have found that the better-ranking sites had domain names that were 5 to 10 years old.

Are other websites linking to yours? If you move your website to a new domain, even if you do it the right way, you stand to lose those valuable inbound links to your site. The search engines take a careful count of inbound links, and each one is like a vote for the popularity and authority of your site. If you want to see how many pages out there link to your site, check with Google and Yahoo.

At Google, type in link:www.yourdomain.com (substituting your actual domain name). Don’t use http://. The results page will show you a list of every external page that links to your website in Google’s index.

At Yahoo, type in the same request, link:www.yourdomain.com and the results page shows a list of every page out there that links to your home page. There are two variables in that search. Where the links are coming from and which page on your site they are linking to. Be default, Yahoo shows you all pages that link to your home page, including the pages on your own site. And it shows only those links that are pointing to your home page. If you change the search parameters, you can remove your own pages from the list and see who else is linking to your site. And you can see if they are linking to any of the other pages inside your website and not just the home page.

If you don’t have any inbound links to your site, or you have very few, then a domain name change would have fewer bad consequences for you. But there is still the age advantage to keeping your old domain name.

Should you have multiple domain names? There are many legitimate reasons why you would want to have multiple domain names for one company. You may want to buy your domain name in every TLD that is available (com, net, org, info, biz, us) and have them all permanently redirect to your .com address. You may want to buy common misspellings for your domain name, or you may just want to keep critics from setting up a negative website using your name. Read all about these reasons here.

You may feel that your domain name needs to include a keyword or it is too long, too short, too trendy, not trendy enough, hard to remember, easy to misspell or whatever! The wise solution? Buy the domain name you want, if you feel you must, but don’t move your website there. Instead, put a permanent redirect in place so that if people type in your www.newdomain.com it will take them to www.olddomain.com instantly and seamlessly.

How to redirect people from your new domain to the old one? The best way to handle this from an SEO perspective is to use a permanent 301 redirect that tells the browsers and search engine bots that the permanent home for that URL is somewhere else.

How to set a 301 redirect the right way? If you are the business owner, talk to a trusted web developer and contact your web hosting company for assistance. Depending upon what kind of server your website is hosted on, you will need to use different methods for setting up a proper 301 redirect. Here’s a comprehensive blog post, and another, and here’s a forum with great detailed discussion about it.

The exceptions to keeping your old domain name? If your existing domain name is fairly new and you don’t have any inbound links, and the new domain name you’re considering is significantly better for your business, then buy the new name and make sure that all of your old pages are permanently redirected to the new location. But keep the old domain name! That way you can keep the redirect in place and ensure that no one else snatches up your identity. Eventually, when all of your inbound links are straightened out, and your new domain has been well established, you may want to retire the old domain name.

And, of course, there may be an older, more desirable domain name available that you can buy. Just be sure you research it carefully so you don’t inadvertently buy a domain name with a shady past that can hurt your company.