Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It's a news site and it gets a lot of return readers, and a lot of search engine traffic. It's an Alexa top 10,000 site. It came out of the "sandbox" in late June.
We're looking at acquiring a new domain. Instead of "widgetsnews.com" it would become "widgets.com." We want to change the name to expand the scope of the site.
The domain we want to buy was first registered in 1999, and has a couple backlinks so I assume Google is well aware of it.
A few questions:
A) By switching to an old domain and combining this with our high number of quality backlinks and traffic, will this help us become an "authority site" more easily? A competitor of ours bought an old domain and from scratch started ranking quite well.
B) What do I need to do to ensure the switch goes a smoothly as possible, and I don't lose ranking (temporarily) or get any filters applied.
Thanks!
You can minimise the risks, but you cannot avoid an initial dip, followed by a rise to a little below where you were before. All you can hope to do is squeeze the timing, and minimize the drop.
Think about it - whatever you do, you will lose some of the links the old site had, maybe many. If they were reciprocal, losing them may be a bonus, but on balance, most sites will lose out on links.
There's no way the move will help you become an authority, it'll be either neutral - or bad news. If age matters, it's bad news. The fact it's a 'used' domain is unlikely to help, unless it wasn't interrupted for long, and the content was similar enough for Google not to have noticed. An unlikely scenario!
