SiteCozy

About those sites that never rank well after a domain change or HTTPs change

I think about the following situations:

  • DomainA.com moved to DomainB.com
  • http://DomainA.com moved to https://DomainA.com
  • http://DomainA.com moved to https://DomainB.com
  • DomainA.com moved to domainB.com and moved back to DomainA.com

Here is a subject that I very much like. Since many years I observed that there are websites that never rank as well as before after a domain change. Here I don’t talk about a handful of web pages but I think about the whole website. 

Example: 

I built up a website from scratch and wrote something like 50 links. After 3 months, this particular website had 50 visitors per day. On the other hand, I have created a website with a similar subject in 2008 and this second website gets 60 visitors per day even if it counts 100 pages. The two websites are powered by WordPress, all-in-one SEO with the same settings and the same plugins. Their site structure is the same. Magazine homepage and links to wordpress categories. 

Strangely enough, I have found that 100% of the websites from which I never changed the domain or moved to HTTPs had the best ranking in Google search result for their number of pages, backlinks, age.

Now, There is a concern about this issue. I feel like domain names that moved to a new website never rank as well as before even after sometimes. Also, I have noticed that steady domain names that never changed have also a more stable google traffic trend in Google search console. 

That’s why I think that in some circumstances, it is better to start from scratch with a brand new domain name for a brand new website rather than setting up 301 redirects from a former domain.

The radical move strategy:

  • Create a new website
  • Move all articles to the new website
  • Return a 410 HTTP error code against all former URL from the former domain name
  • Ask the webmasters of the websites that link to you to create links to the new domain.
  • Wait

For existing domain names, I already created htaccess directives to return a 410 error code against every URLs from the former domain name.

To me, if you start a domain name in HTTPs and stick to it, it is the best solution to maximize your Google web traffic.

Need a domain name? Visit Namecheap