Must change URL, need advice

Adwords impact of changing url

[Lyn99]

I have a site that requires a URL change. The old name has begun to lack relevancy. I'd also like to expand my subject matter.

I can leave the old site up, leaving familiar content for the bots, and begin to add pages. Or not.

I know Google is dealing harshly with redirects. Could someone tell me in simple terms the best way to do this with minimal punishment from Google. The PR on the page is a 4, sometimes a 5, and the keywords are competitive. Severe punishment from Google would be disastrous as the words are already expensive.

I found a good tutorial on another thread, but it's very old, I'm afraid to use it. Some of the newer threads on these changes are simply over my head.

If any of you guys could help me, I'd very much appreciate it.

Lynda

[inbound]

I'm sure others will add to this, but here are a few pointers:

Remember that the 'click history' you have built up with your current adverts is what's saving you money right now - don't throw that away by making wholesale changes without careful consideration.

Running a new advert (with the new URL) in tandem with the old one is essential - doing this for enough time for the new advert to gain Google's trust before retiring the old advert.

Are there SEO considerations? Your post suggests there may be organic traffic considerations - if so don't forget about properly handling the bot exclusions so duplicate content is avoided.

Finally, be careful who you take advice from - this even applies to Google employees that may be seen as trying to help. Hopefully this thread will spawn enough replies to get a good concensus.

[Lyn99]

I'm only moderately concerned right now with SEO, since I've already lost so much in placement due to the subject matter becoming less timely.

My overriding concern is AdWords fallout from the URL change. In my nightmares, little pink boxes, and please raise your bid to $10.00.

The more I read, the more confused I'm getting. On an older thread on this board, a site owner with a situation similar to mine was told it was better to just start over. The conflicting information is unreal.

I'm more confused than ever. I don't even know where to begin to do this in the correct manner.

[smallcompany]

I read somewhere on Google about how they recommend doing side redesign including domain name change. It boiled down to design and name change, but not content and structure at the same time. So, what you could do is:

Step 1: Move content to a new domain
Step 2: 301 old domain name to the new one
Step 3: Use AdWords editor to copy everything from current account
Step 4: Paste everything into the NEW account
Step 5: Do a bulk chage of display and destination URLs

Why I put NEW account? Use the old one as a reference (baseline) and see how new account behaves. In addition, you will protect old account’s history if you are expecting performance decline at the beginning. If you keep everything in the original account, you may have some gain based on the history, but remember, Google knows stuff in advance.
When you create brand new campaign, Google already knows something about it and they do their algorithmic prediction of your keywords and site combination which results in QS.
This way (with two accounts), you can always go back to your old account that you left intact.

Now going back to the very beginning and advice that has come from Google itself, you do redesign (if you are doing any), you 301 it to a new domain, and you wait a bit. You let Google go through your site so it can figure “Oh that’s that nice and friendly 123.com that got renamed to 456.com now, OK).
Then you start with more changes in regards of content and internal structure.

Although my comments are a lot about SEO side, would you expect AdWords not to talk to regular Google?
Plus the 5 steps should put you on the safe side where you can always go back.

[Lyn99]

I'm studying these answers carefully. I'm beginning to see possibilities I hadn't thought of. There aren't just a few ways to do it, there are many ways.

I never thought of leaving the old site totally alone for a while, just a rename, a little wait, then Google comes to visit and finds that no crackheads moved into the neighborhood.

It'll be easy to tandem the ads--the products aren't changing, just the target market.

[Seb7]

You dont need to rebuild your adwords, just remove the old URL from all your ads, and replace with the new ones, wait a day, and watch the quality scores change.

I think Google mark domains they want adword quality scoring to be rubbish on (no matter what keywords or relivant ads you have), and they dont seem to review that score even if the website completely changes.

[Zuckerman]

I've recently been through a similar change - redirected all my campaigns to a new domain (have completely redone the site etc), & saw my average CPC across 10k+ keywords literally double overnight. This was last week - I'm hoping that they come down pretty quickly...

The new site is more relevant that the previous one, yet I'm being punished pretty harshly at the moment. Anyone have any ideas how long it takes for things to return to normal? I'm increasingly finding all QS references in Google completely useless - my quality score across these keywords is still "great" - only now I'm paying twice as much for a lower position....

[Lyn99]

If you had it to do over again, would you add the new domain name to the old site, with evolving redesign and incremental content change?