To renew a domain because of 301 of one well ranked article?

[NVentouris]

Hi all,
I have a surname.me domain for my blog which I have to pay 22€ each year. I have written 3 articles there and one of them went huge viral and made me known.
After that i bought another domain and i started write articles there. Now my .me domain is gonna expire.
My question is: Can I move this nice article to my new domain in order to abandon the .me or should I pay 22 per year for that one article to 301 redirect it to my new one ?

Thanks a lot,

[aakk9999]

You could move the article and abandon .me but if something goes wrong and your "another domain" does not any more rank for it, then you have no way back.

It also depends on how the users come to your article - if they search it in Google you may take a chance, but if you have a lots of direct traffic and lots of referrals from other domains then without redirection you will lose all this traffic (or most of it, as a minority may, after receiving 404 not found, search for the article using Google).

Are you monetising this article? If you do, you may want to consider keeping the domain and redirecting.

What you can also do is an experiment: renew for one year, so you still have the domain, then implement redirect to tell Google the article has moved, and after a few months take the .me domain down (do not host it) and watch what happens. If the effect is not what you expected, as you still own the .me domain, then you can re-instate its hosting and redirect. On the other hand, if after not hosting it for a few months you are happy with the result, then you can drop it.

Do remember though that if someone else buys that domain and re-instate the content, it may outrank you for your own article and you may end up in a position in needing to use some legal routes in order to take the article down from that domain. Or that someone may just buying the domain and redirect the traffic elsewhere (if there were lots of referrals and directs).

[anilvalvi]

If you are getting good amount of traffic and sales, I suggest you, Keeping the domain as it is because If something goes wrong it will create big trouble.

[NVentouris]

Thanks both of you ! I will renew my domain for one more year and i will consider it next year. In order to inform all my readers for the change ! Thanks a lot again.

[tangor]

Keep the old domain for at least a year. Put the page on the new domain with the old domain redirecting to the new page. If done right, the old domain will not appear, only the new one. To make sure this works, rename the old page to "oldpage.1:" or something different from the original name, leaving only the original name on the new site.

If, as mentioned above, you aren't happy with the results you can always restore the old site just by changing the filename to the original and removing the redirect.

[Robert Charlton]

aakk9999's suggestion is a good one, of holding on to the old domain for a year and reducing it in steps. As she points out, though, once you drop ownership of the old domain, you run the risk of losing the incoming link credits.

You could try getting some of the main links changed... always a good idea when you change domains... but often difficult to accomplish.

It's not clear whether you've currently got the .me linking to the new domain and sharing that link juice with other articles in the new site. If not, you may have something to gain by moving the article to the new domain, redirecting the .me page to the new page, and using internal nav to link from the article to key related pages on the new site.

Add an observation period to your schedule, to give this setup time to take. If the additional linking improves the performance of your other pages, it may be worthwhile holding onto the .me for a while longer. I always tell clients that if they have inbound links to an old domain that they really want to preserve, they should hold the old domain "in perpetuity and beyond."

I understand that's costly with this kind of site, but you had the good fortune of a viral article, and backlinks are an important part of that legacy. Probably worth checking out the Trust Flow of your existing backlinks with Majestic, to make sure you're not losing any prime links.

The questions aakk9999 asks about traffic to the article are also very important here... it's not just about link juice.