Warning for those buying generic or premium domains

[smee]

Some would purchase a generic domain for the purpose of improving on their old non generic domain however it can result in a drop of ranking, rather than improve the rank:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-nuts-migrations-14766.html

 

[morganp]

I would never transfer a website to a new domain, purely for this reason. If i was the owner of those sites i would simply have set-up a new websites and ran both in unison. This way old rankings are kept, and a new site for visitors to find.

If he was sneaky he could have set-up as a competitor to his old website, and drive sales to one another with special promotions. win win

 

[DavidL]

I would never transfer a website to a new domain, purely for this reason. If i was the owner of those sites i would simply have set-up a new websites and ran both in unison. This way old rankings are kept, and a new site for visitors to find.

Yeah I agree. Also there's no real additional SEO benefit of using nuts.com over nutsonline.com I wouldn't have thought. So expecting an actual increase in ranking is unrealistic. If the former name was abctrading.com and not a really aged and authoritative name, then it could be worth the switch for SEO purposes alone.

However for non-seo purposes (eg branding), it's probably not a bad move even copping the ranking drops

 

[findtim]

run 2 in unison: yep morgan thats the best way at the start, i have a few clients like that and it has worked effectivly, a recent case is now they take up 2 spots on google, funnily the old site ranks higher even though i have done some good seo work on the new one so "longevity" must be playing a major role in its rankings.

I did 6 "transitions" like this just as panda started, the one i talk about above was during penguin, so i'm not sure if that made a difference as the panda ones all shifted seemlessly.

does that article suggest that 301 redirects are dead because waiting months for it to take effect is ridiculous in this day when google says its indexing 100 mllion pages a second !

tim

 

[marketingweb]

I changed domains on a particular website due to a business rebranding, not for SEO reasons.

Did the right thing re webmaster tools, wildcard 301 redirects etc....

Lost traffic for about a week, but now better than ever. Most rankings around where they were before. Some a little lower, others MUCH better - big jumps!

I have done no linkbuilding since, and the content is maybe 95% the same as the old site. So some of the numbers of secondary keywords for internal pages (eg position 80 to position 6) have really surprised me. So not always a bad thing.