Change of URL means lost position?

domain name changes

[adsta]

I want to change my sites domain name now that the domain name I want to use has become available to me. The problem is that I have just started showing up in the top 10 in google and I dont want to loose this as its taken me too many hours to get there!

I also have a decent adwords campaign going with this site and have heard that if i change the destination URL then it resets the campaign as if it were a new one.

Can i have the same website under two different domain names and gradually build my new one up until i can pull down the older one? Is that dup content or does that only apply witin a website?

the original is a .com and i want to do to .co.nz because im not showing up in google when a user clicks the 'pages from New Zealand' button when they go to search.

Help would be so much appreciated.

[Stefan]

Can i have the same website under two different domain names and gradually build my new one up until i can pull down the older one? Is that dup content or does that only apply witin a website?

It would be dicey, but maybe possible. The thing is (I think), you would have to have the sites entirely separate (no cross-linking), with different inbound links, substantially different templates for the content, and it would be best if you altered the text itself somewhat and used different navigation (you want G to see these as truly different sites). That way, you'd just be competing against yourself in the non-local NZ serps. The dup content isn't restricted to the same site - if the page is basically the same on two sites, then one will go missing from the serps - that's what happens with hijacking.

Don't take the above as gospel; I might have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Robert Charlton]

First, if you were going to move from currentdomain.com to newdomain.com, I'd say from sad experience, don't do it. You would see "sandbox"-like effects, probably from a loss of link credibility on all of your inbound links, and until new credibility was established, which might take 9 or so months, you would probably lose your rankings on competitive phrases.

I'd also say not to have dupe content on two .com domains. One would disappear from the serps, and you'd have inevitable linking confusion as well.

But .com and .co.nz might be an entirely different situation. Like Stefan's reply, this one is a little bit theoretical, but it's based on a fair amount of research.

In my research, I was looking at how to build an international site ultimately covering 16 countries and almost as many languages, and I concluded that it would work best if each language were on a country-specific domain hosted in its own country, with inbound links to each domain coming from sites in its own country.

One of the questions that occurred was what about dupe content problems on .com and .co.uk? After further research, I'm reasonably assured that if the sites were hosted in the US and the UK respectively, and the bulk of the inbound links to the .com site came from the US, and the bulk of the inbound links to the .co.uk site came from the UK, that Google would not treat these sites as dupes.

I couldn't guarantee this, but, when the project moves ahead, I'm betting on it enough that that's the way we're going to proceed. I don't know whether the links would have to be split up between the US and the UK, as I describe, but that's clearly the cleanest way to do it. I do know that the inbounds should be from separate and unrelated sources.

I'm guessing that if this would work for the US and the UK, it should work for the US and NZ... but that's a guess. I'm not sure about the US and CA either.

I'm assuming that since the content is the same, the templates and navigation would make no difference. I wouldn't cross-link the sites, except maybe on the home page and maybe also on a links page (which I might even block using the meta robots element).

I don't know whether MSN and Yahoo would treat the sites as dupes or as separate. Their perceptions of link quality, IMO, aren't as refined as Google's, and this might be a problem for this kind of setup.

Anyway, that's best guess about keeping up both sites. You might try building up the .co.nz domain gradually, at first with separate content and separate NZ inbounds... and then gradually introduce some dupe content to see what happens.

With regard to 301 redirecting the old .com domain to the new .co.nz domain, it may be that New Zealand isn't seeing the kind of "sandbox" time-related link-credibility problems we're seeing here in the US. I'd rely on feedback from New Zealand about that.

No telling, though, what the link-credibility situation might be if all your inbounds to a .co.nz domain came from the US via 301 redirects.